Television

January 23, 2015

I remember when Charles and Bruce began publishing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, how their writing made me think of language in a new way. Whether I’m in Australia, or on a reservation in South Dakota, when people say they are talking “in Language,” what I know is that they’re talking in their Mother Tongue. To these folks, English is not Language, English is the way you get along. Language is who you are, words that have been passed down through generations.

“Language Matters” is the first nationwide media recognition of the Language Crisis, which is not just about languages, but cultural diversity. It’s about global homogenization, the Pringleization of society, about cultures being steamrollered under globalization. The growing call to action for language preservation is a drive to see the cultures of the world through a lens of understanding and respect, of seeing the world through a cultural lens, not just a political one. The problem is that in this era of the consciousness of literacy, in this world of hard science, endangered languages and cultures are disadvantaged; if you don’t have the quantification, the metrics, you don’t really have something to say. Quantifying languages is complex (I’d like to say impossible, but I can’t). This is where the poets come in.

Four years ago, when we started “Language Matters,” people were saying there were 7,000 languages in the world. Now there are 6,000, not because we’ve lost that many languages, but because now that these numbers are really starting to count for something on the political table, linguists are beginning to hedge. It’s hard to know exactly how many languages there are, and harder to enumerate speakers. It’s not like counting the number of pandas. In the prologue to the motion poem “Khonsay,” where each line from a different endangered/minority language, we split the difference, say there are 6,500. And the reason I used the “endangered/minority” construct is because linguists also disagree on the at-risk level of many many languages.

When I was in Wales asking people if they spoke Welsh, there were people with a junior high level of vocabulary who were quite proud that they could speak Welsh. Others, who were absolutely fluent, said they couldn’t really speak it. They were hanging out with people who were born into the language, who knew more slang.

The only thing everyone agrees with is that huge numbers of languages, languages that have been around, usually, for millennia, are dying out right now.

When I tell people we’re losing half the languages on the planet by the end of this century, unless we do something about it, they never ask “how many languages is that, exactly?” Instead, their reactions are always “yes, let’s do something about it.” And again, this is why I think that participating in the Language Movement, helping to protect all languages, is part of the job of the poet in 2015. It’s a movement to protect the diversity of languages in the world. A movement to give respect to all languages. A movement to appreciate that each language has its own poetry, and is an important part of an Ecology of Consciousness.

Digital Consciousness connects us all. But are we listening to each other? Are we respecting each other’s traditions? It’s great to have “Language Matters” find its way out into the world, four years after David Grubin and I had that lunch. When I was working on “The United States of Poetry” with Mark Pellington and Joshua Blum, Josh, who gave me a dictum about TV that I’ll never forget. “The first rule of making a television program, is to get it on television.” The national broadcast of “Language Matters on PBS is the end of that quest, of that story.

Which means it’s the beginning of the journey. Now that people have seen the show, what about the call to activism inherent in it? So I ask all you poets out there to live like Natalie Diaz, and help your own Language find its way into the world. And if that Language happens to be English, well then you don’t understand the part about what Language is. Help me get this program into places where languages are struggling to survive and a screening of the film will give cred to the work. Find languages around you and learn from them. Take seriously the role of the poet as a protector of language, not just a user.

There’s nothing like writing a poem, to take words, each one with its own history, multiple meanings, and build a sculpture of meaning. It’s a gift, the words that come to us. People have sparked these sounds, people have laid down their lives for their continuation—language is the essence of humanity, and poetry is the essence of language.

Working with linguists has allowed me to see language from the other side. The collaboration of science and art is good for everybody. If you never could understand the people who come up to you and say they can’t understand poetry, I recommend your going to a linguistics conference and try to understand what those people are talking about!

But to me that’s what the future holds. Sit through a lecture in a language you don’t understand, listen to the poetry of a language you’re trying to learn, place yourself in a situation where English is useless, learn what Language really is. This is the clarion call of our time. This is why Language Matters.

Asking Charlie Mangulda, the Last Speaker of Amurdak, to overdub his performance from the sacred site of Mt. Borradale, was one of the most complex and unnerving directorial moves—to me, not to him—I’ve ever had to do. John Tranter, our local sound guy, is just a dynamite practitioner. But recording Charlie’s voice, two, cracking clapstick players, and a bulbous didgeridoo on a cave’s platform under an ancient painting of a Rainbow Serpent, proved to be too much for our top-of-the-line digital equipment. This poem tells the story. I won’t repeat it. I won’t even tell you what Ma barang! means, I’m sure you already know. And if you don’t know, then you really do already know.

What I do want to talk about, briefly, is the opening lines. In Amurdak, Charlie’s language, is one of the very few instances where you can actually see a difference in consciousnesses between languages. The idea that some languages are more primitive than others is simply cultural prejudice: you can say anything in any language, and every language has a full syntax and grammatology. But in Amurdak, Charlie doesn’t know his left from his right. This concept, which until the 1960s was thought to be universal, actually doesn’t exist in a few languages. The way Charlie designates direction is simply and solely through cardinal directions. And it’s been shown that it doesn’t matter where speakers of these languages are placed, they are automatically oriented to the compass points, so that they can say of the choices, “I’ll take the one on the southwest.”

Now, you could infer from this that Amurdak people don’t see themselves, each one, as the center of the universe, where left and right is always and only consistent to the person speaking. Instead, the Amurdak people—or in this case, Charlie, the Last Speaker—is simply a point standing somewhere on Earth. But that’s just an inference. Or maybe a poem.

One more thing before we close. When Charlie was translating the creation myth of Warramurrungunji, he listed the dozen or so languages that the Goddess dropped, thus bringing humans to the place she had created. Somehow, under the disturbing lights of the camera, with the intrusion of the microphone, Charlie remembered three words of a language that linguist Nick Evans, an expert on cultures of Northern Australia, didn’t know he could speak. And when Charlie mentioned Wurdirrk and gave Nick some words, it was the first time that this language has ever been recorded. That’s correct. I think this was The Apotheosis of the whole shoot of “Language Matters.” I could see the headline in the Times: Documentary Crew Discovers Lost Language.

The words Charlie spoke translate to: “I want to listen to you,” “yam-digging tool,” and “give me fire.” The first thing that was apparent to Nick from these three words is that they are unlike any other language, which means Wurdirrk is not a dialect—without these words, we never would have known that.

As a poet, I’d like to say one more thing about the words. If you triangulate from them, what you have is a whole culture. “I want to listen to you,” the essence of the community. “Yam-digging tool,” the basis of the community’s relationship with the earth and it also means “digging deeply into the meaning of something.” And “give me fire,” the essence of light, of heat, a great song title, and the best joke in the book.

For “gimme fire,” I envisioned Charlie as a little boy, these strange people coming out of the darkness late at night, shivering and cold, needing some of this precious fire for light and heat. Later, Charlie would give me the deeper meaning of this idiom. Hey buddy, you got a match?

The Stomp (Y Stomp, in Welsh), is the National Poetry Slam of Wales. It is part of the annual Eisteddfod, the national cultural festival of all things Welsh. As I say in “Language Matters,” “It’s a lot like the state fairs in the US, except that instead of prizes for pies or pigs, the prizes are for poetry.”

The first Eisteddfod was in 1176, when Lord Rhys invited poets and musicians from all over the country to compete for a seat at his table. You could sing for your supper, and then get fed. Winning was an entree into the house of the Lords, and a golden meal ticket for the winning poet. The chair you pulled up to the table was a special Bard’s Chair, and to this day, the prize for the winning poet in the Formal Category is a Chair. Hand-carved by an artisan, the winner gets to take the Chair home, sit in it, and write more poems. In Welsh.

For me, as usual, the whole thing started at the Bowery Poetry Club, when we hosted readings by Welsh poets as part of the Peoples Poetry Gatherings, 2002-03. That’s where I began to feel the intensity around this ancient Celtic language. Whenever I bring up Welsh in New York, the response is invariably, “Well, what about Irish?” While the Irish fought and gained political independence, they did so in English. The Irish language is now much more endangered than Welsh. The Welsh never fought for independence, but rather cultural parity, and today Welsh is considered the only endangered language to have come off the endangered language list. It’s a success story by any metric, which is why it got its place in “Language Matters.”

One of the poets I met at the Club is Grahame Davies, who writes in both Welsh and English, and whose work and being was crucial in my decision to study Welsh. Grahame lives the fire and rigor needed to keep this ancient language alive. The fire is contagious, and to prepare for the film, I flew to Wales and began my own formal and informal study of the language.

Grahame picked me up at the Caerdydd (Cardiff) Airport, and we headed for breakfast with Elinor Robson of the Welsh Language Society. I confessed my dream to them, and we all laughed over a full Welsh. What? I, who didn’t even know enough to fly to Manchion (Manchester) to get to Gog Gymru (North Wales), who couldn’t say Blaenau Ffestiniog (the slate-mining town where I live in Wales), let alone spell it, who hadn’t even met Dewi Prysor! was proposing that I participate in next year’s Stomp! I, who didn’t know from “hwyl” (aloha), was going to write and perform a poem in Welsh -- all for this documentary I was making for PBS.

And as you now can see on the front page of the live-stream at PBS.org, the fantasy came real, all duded up in lucky Tibetan cap and Mexican guayabera, taking on all comers at Stomp 2012. “Ladies and Gentlemen! My first line of cynghanedd!” I am saying, to translate the first words of this post. And it really was the first cynghanedd I ever wrote.

In the film, the line is followed by a raucous audience response, Stomp cards held high—unlike the U.S. Slam, at the Stomp the audience is the judge, and they judge by holding up different colored cards to indicate their favorite poet. Watch as I collect a brotherly hug from Dewi, my mentor, friend and Stomp opponent, also an award-winning novelist and Stomp-winning poet, whose current job is translating episodes of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” into Welsh.

The cynghanedd is what separates formal Welsh poetry from free verse; in fact, it is what separates Welsh poetry from any other poetry in the world. There are six different forms of cynghanedd, and to win the Chair, you must write a poem that includes sections written in each. Each form has its own rules, here’s a general description the poetic device Marerid Hopwood, in her handbook Singing in Chains: Listening to Welsh Verse, describes as “consonant chime :” to create a cynghanedd , a line is divided into three sections, a double caesura. The middle section is thrown out. The two sections left, must have all their consonants (except the last) match up. In other words, the vowels, and of course in Welsh, Y and W are always vowels, are immaterial. The sounds we use to make rhymes don’t count.

Now from here things get a little complex. Sometimes there is internal rhyme, sometimes rhyme line-to-line, sometimes both—but let’s just leave it at that. The extraordinary thing is that a Welsh audience can hear the cynghanedd, applauding an especially good one, and be quite aware of a poet trying to slide something by. As an American poet writing in Welsh, even in the Stomp, to come up with a cynghanedd was quite a feat.

(Hopwood’s title is of course a line from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas. The irony is that while we think of Thomas as the Welsh poet, in Wales he’s often not even considered to be in the top tier. Why? Because he didn’t write in Welsh. In fact, many people think that a lot of Thomas’s power comes from his having heard and digested the sounds and rhythms of Welsh poetry as a youth, and then using these Welsh cynghanedd forms in English. For your further elucidation, another poet who used Welsh forms and sounds was that old Jesuit and inventor of sprung rhythm, Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Quick cut back to breakfast—Grahame and Elinor waving goodbye, I’m training/bussing it to Nant Gwrtheyrn, the Welsh Cultural Center, where I will begin my formal study of Welsh. Flashback to Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, six months before, where another Welsh poet, Sian Melangell Dafydd, replies to my comment that I want to learn Welsh by saying “there’s this magical place in Llyn…” Flash forward to Grahame Davies’ brillant Everything Must Change, a novel that is a mash-up of the Welsh language protests of the 60s with the bio of Simone Weill. Flash further forward to my two weeks’ immersion at Nant where my Welsh teacher Llinos Griffin is prodding the Cymraeg (Welsh language) out of me, saying “You, know, you really should meet Dewi Prysor…”

…And what was your first line of cynghanedd, Bob? you’ve probably been wondering. “Yn ysgwd yn fy esgyrn.” Which, as you can see in “Language Matters,” I learn how to pronounce as I drive our van (my full title: host/driver) through scenic Wales, and which the show’s storyteller/line producer, Sian Taifi, also tries to instill in me by having me sing the words.

Besides Sian, Dewi and Grahame, the film also shows me learning with David Crystal, Europe’s most famous linguist, and Ivor ap Glyn, poet and TV host/producer. The line translates, “I am shaking my bones,” and as you can tell by my rendering, I really was.

The Stomp is a variant of the US Poety Slams, and I’ve done enough Slams to know that grabbing attention at the top is crucial. So I asked Dewi to teach me something that would bust through in case anyone at the Stomp should heckle my mispronunciation or lack of mutations, (Mutations! The bete noir of the Welsh language. Did you notice back a-ways how cynghanedd mutated to gynghanedd? Not a typo! In English and French we often elide one word into another by dropping the last letter: singing to singin’, eg. In Welsh, you “mutate” the first letter of the incoming word, so that, for example, if you are going to Bangor, you would say im Mangor, the B of Bangor mutating to an M. Which of course makes driving in Wales even more fun.) So the title I came up with for my Stomp masterpiece is: Ffwciwch Oma! Dwin Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg! which, lovingly translates to “Fuck Off! I’m a Fuckin’ Welsh Fuckin’ Learner!”

Not only would I be trying to turn my lack of Welsh into an advantage by begging for the sympathy vote, but I’d also be paying homage to the colorful language the Stomp is known for, especially as used so expressively by my mate Prysor and the training camp he established in Blaenau (The Queen), with occasional side trips to Llan (Y Pengwyrn) and Tanygrisiau (Y Tap) -- three major pubs in three parts of town. It’s also worth noting that there are no indigenous curse words in Welsh; like Ffwcin, they’re all borrowings from bully English.

Playing between orality and literacy is one of my favorite areas of poetic exploration. In fact, it was how I got involved with Endangered Languages in the first place. Of the 6000 languages in the world (I just love saying that!), only 700 are written down. The Welsh oral traditions, from the Celitc storytellers and Druid poemmakers all he way to today’s Stomp, has been crucial to the language’s survival. And it was through my investigations into the roots of hiphop poetry (hiphop IS poetry!), that I first came across the Language Crisis.

Having established myself as an appropriately iconoclastic bardd Cymreig in the poem’s title, I felt it was important that the first line of the poem reverse field and show my respect for Welsh culture: “Rwy'n teimlo fel y ddraig goch yng nghanol y frwydr,” imparts to me a mythic status, as I identify with the deepest image of Welsh mythology: “I feel like the Red Dragon entering into battle.” You may have noticed that Wales is the only country with a Red Dragon on its flag: the symbol of Wales, sleeping underground next to the White Dragon (England), waiting only for the Apocalypse to disinter, and then emerge victorious in the ensuing battle royale. Wow.

I straighten out this lie in the next line: “Bardd Americanaidd tumffat yng nghanol y Stomp.” “Actually, I’m just a stupid American poet trying to hold me own in the Stomp.” Another secret of Slam success: flip the script! Set up a high image, and then undercut it with your own vulnerability.

The next lines reference my aforementioned debt to hiphop. Hiphop is part of my lineage, too—for a while there in the 80s my tag was the Plain White Rapper. To write this section took painstaking work at the Blaenau llyfrgell (library) with a correlating a rhyming dictionary and a Welsh-English dictionary—why oh why is there no rhyming Welsh-English Dictionary?

Eisiau ymddiheuriad? dim posibiliad...

Eisiau nghyfeiriad? Dyna ddiffiniad o wrthddywediad

A distrywio’r diffiniad!

My address? The definition of randomness

The contradiction of definition!

Definition Demolition!

This also gives a nod to the course I’ve developed at Columbia, “Exploding Text: Poetry Performance,” using extra-literary means to add even more meanings to a poem via collaborations with film, dance, theater, et al.

After this jangly, dirty, provocative opening, I felt it was time for some “real” poetry, and being a “real” poet myself I knew just what lines to use: steal them, from a couple of great poets.

Hen Gychwr Afon Angau, // mae o’n gwbod

Beth ydwyt ti a minnau, frawd

Ond swp o esgyrn mewn gwisg o gnawd

Old River Boatman Death (Rwilliams Parry), he knows it

What art thou and I, brother But in a uniform batch of bones of flesh

I was truly hoping someone in the audience would out me here (I should have had a plant!), so that my next barrage, taking personal blame not only for my plagerism but also for every crime ever committed during the horrific triumph of Capitalism known as US Imperialism would have more resonance:

Dygwyd y llinellau uchod ar eich cyfer oddi ar

R Williams Parry a TH Parry Williams yn enw

Imperialaeth Americanaidd....!

The lines above stolen on your behalf from R Williams Parry & TH Parry Williams in the name of American Imperialism!

This is followed by the lines from “Language Matters.”

Cynghanedd, defended from the orality of the skalds, has been an integral part of Welsh has survived. Hopwood confesses at one point that she believes you can only truly write cynghanedd in the language that evolved in tandem with the poetic form: Cymraeg (Welsh). In essence, her whole lovely how-to is actually nothing but a piece of propaganda for the perpetuation of Welsh.

Cymru, the Welsh word for Wales, means Us, The People. “Wales” is a Saxon word, what the Saxons, the first conquering invaders of Wales, called the Celts there—“The others,” “Those guys over there.” Isn’t it time for the world’s nations to be known by the name that their people call themselves?

It’s true that my relationship with Welsh is a lot like having a lover—you have to give everything and there’s always more and thank goodness it’s never enough. But my head of dreams – in English I wanted this to be my big head, big enough to hold all these languages and the idea that somehow or other that this piece of theater, sacrificing myself on the pyre that is the Stomp, would show my love and respect for Welsh, that I would go to his extreme in order to bring my own personal touch to a documentary that is all about the essence of humanity, which I believe language is, but which can also be talked about in theories and data where it’s possible human contact may be lost.

Of the 12 poets who made it to the National Poetry Slam, Dewi and I were the first two names out of the hat. We went up against each other, splitting our supporters’ votes, and giving the first round to some brilliant whippersnapper poet who had somehow made cynghanedd a mode of conversation—brilliant! As if Byron were crossed with Frank O’Hara, say.

Because we were knocked out in the first round, the crew was able to shoot a wrap-up, right then and there, full of loss that meant nothing, and surrounded by a language that had taught me important truths that would infuse the whole film. And my life.

After the wrap, the crew really wanted to hit the road. I felt bad—for the poet to leave a reading early is bad form, in any language. But it was already late, and our flight back to the States was at 8:00 the next morning, and we had to drive to Llundain, and the Welsh sky was already ablaze. And my big head was full of big dreams but no way sleeping.

January 20, 2015

And so I made my first trip to Hawaii. It’s a long way from everywhere, specks of black lava, folded green jewels in the middle of the largest body of water on the planet – you will now know that, Hawaii is the further from a continent than any other on the planet. No wonder the creation story here, the Kumulipo, begins underwater, with the creation of fish, coral and octopus, and rises up with the spirit of Pele, the Goddess of Fire, a real place—the active volcano in the center of the Big Island. Pele is a real person, too. I met her many-times-Great Granddaughter, Pele Harmann, a teacher at Nawahi, the K-12 immersion school outside Hilo where I spent many a day hearing No English. It’s an honor to be allowed to step inside someone else’s culture. Tread lightly. As Pele said to me, “To you it’s a myth. To me it’s my genealogy.”

This is what you learn. That unlike the rest of the world’s crises, the Language Crisis has a seemingly simple answer: Respect Mother tongues. Let the children born into minority languages live there as much as possible. They will get plenty of the bully language as soon as they walk out the door, as soon as they turn on the TV.

Today there are Hawaiian language immersion schools on every island, but back in the 60s there were none. The number of speakers had shrunk to about 400 with most of them living on the tiny island of Ni’ihau, which was owned (still is) by a single family who allow no non-Hawaiians to set foot there. So the native population lives on in a kind of time capsule of pure Hawaiian. When Larry Kimura, the godfather of the Hawaiian language, and his Hawaiian language students at the University of Hawaii Manao came to the conclusion that just speaking Hawaiian with each other for hours a day was not making the kind of substantive change necessary to keep Hawaiian culture alive, they decided the way forward was to start schools where children would learn Hawaiian the way all children learn languages – by hearing, by mimicking, by conversing. By spending time in a place where the sound environment was always the flowing lilt and glottal stops of Hawaiian. This was the beginning of the punana leo, a language nest. Here children would spend hours daily in a protected place—a nest of Hawaiian. Parents must accompany their little ones (3 months to 5 years ) here, and parents too are bound by the rules. So they end up learning baby Hawaiian, just to keep up with their child. I’m sitting there and a toddler purposefully approaches and starts speaking to me—in Hawaiian. Wants me to read him a book in Hawaiian. I oblige—I may not know all the meanings, but I can read the words, and I’m learning, like he is. But I don’t speak Hawaiian! I’d said to the teacher. Not yet, was her reply.

It was a few kapunas (elders, but like so many Hawaiian words, much more than elders), those remaining from the 400 speakers in 1960, who brought the sounds and traditions of real Hawaiian direct to these students. Auntie Lolena Nichols—I could devote a whole blog to how kinship patterns in orality are as complex as nuclear fission, but right now let’s just say “Auntie”—was one of these native speakers from Ni’ihau. These days she divides her time between the children at the punana leo and graduate students at the University of Hawaii, Manao. In oral consciousness, people are books, and as the language activist/scholar Puakea Nogelmeier is fond of saying, Auntie Lolena is a PhD in living Hawaiian. When I first met Lolena, I presumed a Hawaiian greeting: forehead to forehead, nose to nose, you breathe in the breath of the other. Lolena’s power almost knocked me over.

Nogelmeier, himself is a very special man with a deliciously deep voice. You get to hear it every time you take a bus in Honolulu. Most of the streets still have their original Hawaiian names, but as the language died out so did proper pronunciation. The names became haole, the Hawaiian word for white people, but as the language movement (not Bernstein/Andrews, but the push for mother tongue survival) gained momentum one of the successes was hearing Puakea’s dulcet tones pronounce real Hawaii’an as you take public transportation in Honolulu.

One thing you notice right away in the language is the ‘okina, the glottal stop, considered an actual letter in Hawaiian, one of eight consonants. There are five vowels. Thirteen letters altogether, and one of them is the silent “hitch” you hear when you say uh-oh. Having a language with such a few number of letters, each of which is pronounced in only one way (well, vowels are short and long, but long just means they are longer, not that they have a different sound), gives Hawaiian only 18 phonemes, one of the fewest of any language (English has 57, the Koisan click languages over 140).

It also makes Hawaiian an extremely easy language for speakers to read. Think of the evolution of written English, its centuries of inconsistent spellings and idiosyncratic pronunciations. How different it was for literacy to arrive in Hawaii. When the first missionaries arrived in 1820, they quickly developed a written language and translated the Bible into Hawaiian, the better to convert the populace. They gained the full support of the royal family, who even at this time were considered not the descendants of gods, but actual gods. And when these kings and queens took up the advocacy of reading, it took less than fifty years for Hawaii to surpass the Mainland in literacy, eventually having one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It was said that Hawaiians could read upside-down – because of the lack of reading material, four people would stand around a book or newspaper – two read sideways, one straight on, one upside down.

One of the reasons this happened was the advent of Hawaiian newspapers. Over the next 100 years, more than 100 native language newspapers were founded. But it wasn’t the news they were reporting, it was the incredibly rich Oral culture that they were recording. Every endangered language that is being revived develops techniques for adding vocabulary for new things and concepts (computer, cell pone, defriend, Pringle-ization), and for words that have been lost. But it’s only Hawaii, where the people fell so in love with reading that now researchers can “mine” this trove to find forgotten vocabulary, ideas for new words, and still hear the voices from the days when the language was teeming with energy, the essence of Hawaiian culture full flower.

I want to talk about my visit with William Merwin, who of course lives in Haiku on the island on Maui, telling me that Hawaiian will be back when it is “considered a first language, when you make jokes in it, play around with it.” I want to travel way up the mountain and tell you about my visit with Keali’I Richel,who told me how hula became the way that language survived during the years that the American colonists outlawed it, how “you can have a hula poem without the dance, but you can’t have the dance without the poem.” I want you to meet Kaui sa-Dudoit, the Mother of the Language Movement, whose dozen kids all grew up in immersion schools, all rebelled as teenagers and stopped, and all came back.

And I want you to see David Grubin and me actually getting in the water, up to our knees, daring the Pacific in our bermudas, trying to write a poem while the waves tried to push us over. But instead, it is time to go to Wales, and meet a language that has survived for over a thousand years while the powerful onslaught of bully English ruled the land.

January 19, 2015

Alice Quinn, in all her ebullience, “Bob, this is Eve. Eve Grubin. She’s David Grubin’s daughter! She’s a poet.” This in the sunny, energized Poetry Society of America offices—what a great meeting. Eve was a young poet with a new job. Her dad, a renowned PBS producer/director, had just created “The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets” hosted by Bill Moyers and shot at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. My own PBS series, “The United States of Poetry,” had been broadcast at the same time. There’s so little contact between poetry and television—seemed like David and I were the only people in the universe uniting these two opposites. But plenty of people thought David and I represented two different camps of poetry – academic and street/spoken word. But David had had me be in his film and – oh, this was so marvelously complicated! But it was terrific meeting Evie that day at PSA, thinking of David also as a father, like I was with my daughters. And now we could say hello at parties! Who knew where this might lead?

The story begins The Poem’s new forms in the dawning of the Era of Digital Consciousness. In the beginning, (1980?), I knew television to be the Enemy. TV was why nobody was coming to my readings! They were all at home in front of the Cyclops in the Corner. But then, by luck and friends and a certain proclivity, I had the opportunity to get poetry on television—on WNYC-TV, before Giuliani sold it and it became NY1. For the six years that I produced “Poetry Spots,” television became just another way to transmit the poem. Funny what a little power will do.

I’d learned from Walter Ong that Orality is not a precursor to writing, but a separate and equivalent consciousness. This factoid changed my life. Television became just another platform for poetry to make nothing happen. For tens of thousands of years poetry was solely an oral art. Then came writing, famously followed by print. Now we have digital: film/video/internet. The medium of transmission may change, but the poem is always The Poem.

This interest in Orality is what led me to my fieldwork in Africa, searching for the roots of hip-hop. And I knew that if I were to make this expedition right, led by my guide, mentor and friend, Alhaji Papa Susso, I’d need a couple of cameras and a soundman. Luckily, this kind of realistic insanity is shared by my good buddy, Ram Devineni, who produced these explorations of oral traditions into a three-part series on LinkTV. As soon as we had DVDs of the imaginatively-titled “On the Road with Bob Holman: Africa and Israel,” I immediately sent one to my PBS doppelgänger, David Grubin. It had been 20 years since PBS did poetry.

And so it was that we found ourselves at a pleasant boite on the Bowery, discussing poetry over lunch. David liked “On the Road”! Well, I said, I think of myself as a poet in my documentaries. It was great to talk with a real documentary filmmaker, and heartening that he liked my work. Maybe I got a little nudgey when I asked David if there was anything he could do to help me with this project, and he replied, What do you have in mind? Why don’t we do a project together, I subtly suggested, With you as producer and director? And to my utter astonishment, David replied, Well, let’s see if we can get the money.

It may sound like a line out of Hollywood, but I didn’t notice. If anyone knows the production of an educational documentary from soup to nuts it’s David Grubin and his a fistful of Emmys. He said he’d try the National Endowment for the Humanities first, they had funded him in the past. When I went to the NEH website to check out the grant form, I couldn’t believe that their application model was for “The Buddha,” Grubin’s award-winning documentary. (“The Buddha”, by the way, has over 700,000 likes on Facebook now). This might happen!

And it did.

Here’s our secret. David is totally committed to poetry, as is his wife, the artist Joan Grubin. They read poems to each other every morning, and David’s memorized quite a number. He and I have a great time talking over everyone from Stanley Kunitz to Sekou Sundiata, and the synthesis of our sensibilities—I still remember the way that I was attacked by some people from the Dodge Foundation, “You can’t make a poetry film in MTV bursts, with no narrator!”—was really played out in our quest to use poetry as the engine to bring the world’s attention to the language crisis—half the languages on the planet will disappear this century.

I suggested we make the film in Africa, where Orality is a way of life. Africa is where poets, griots, have a real role in society—and they get paid, too. We could start off in the Kalahari, I said, and listen to Koisan, the “click” languages—they have over 140 phonemes (sounds), the most in the world. Listening to a Koisan speaker is like listening to a jug band in the mouth. And of course there’s the incredible griot traditions of West Africa, where I had previously spent so much time learning, straight from the origins, of African American musical traditions, the birthplace of the blues, jazz, hip-hop. David listened. We need an argument,” he said. We need to tell the story of how languages become endangered, and why that’s important. What do we lose when we lose a language?

Finally, after a lot of nudging on his part, I got it. How about we have a language that’s dying, say, a last speaker. and a language in the struggle of revivification, and close with a success story, actually the only success story (outside of the special case that is Hebrew) -- Welsh, the only language to have come of the endangered list.

And that was it. That’s what we did, and that’s how Language Matters came to be. The money came through from the National Endowment for the Humanities (thank you so, NEH!) and also some from (LINK) Pacific Islanders in Communication (mahalo!). The show will be broadcast this week in most parts of the US, but you’ll have to check your own listings to find out exactly when, and in some places, like Minneapolis, it won’t broadcast until April. Please check with your local stations. My sister Amy lobbied the affiliate in Richmond, VA, and now we’ll be seen there. Thanks, Amy.

One little anecdote for the road. We knew we had to have Wales, and when we met linguist Nick Evans we saw the camera-ready qualities of North Arnhemland, Australia. But for the “language in transition section,” I really thought we should head to Greenland, where some linguists are working in tandem with the population, leading the writing of poems in Greenlandic about walrus hunting and seal fat while actually engaging in the hunts—what could be better?

But Bob, David replied, W.S. Merwin is in Hawaii. He’s studied the language, and planted endangered species of palms that would make a great physical analogy. And the story of the punana leo, the language nests where children speak only Hawaiian…I just stared at him. Ok Bob, David said. You go buy the parkas. I’ll get the bikinis.

December 01, 2014

I work in an industry where everyone wants to be famous. Not only do they want to be famous, but success is measured by what degree of notoriety you have. I do two things. I host a show on local TV about books called Beyond the Book. For the show, I interview touring authors, talk about what’s happening in the local libraries, and (my favorite) visit and discuss local places that have been mentioned in books. More than almost anything, I’d really like the show to grow and be successful. I also teach College English, something I get equally enthusiastic and zealously passionate about. I have opportunities to read the beginnings of a could-be novel and at the same time, make sure students know their way around a comma splice. Geeky, right? It’s pretty awesome.

Working on Beyond the Book for the last few years has absolutely had me thinking about a next step. Could I bring the show to a larger network? Do I think it could ever be national? What would happen then? What would it be like to be famous? Fame. Walking down the street and someone recognizing your face. What would that be like?

Walking into school every day feels like someone just gave me a license to have meaningful input in what our next generation is learning. I can’t believe I get to be here, giving these people what was given to me in school and telling them things I wish I would have known a few years ago. In the classes I teach, I often require a paper, a script, a poem, or a short story, among other things. There have been a few times that a first draft has been so good-so inspiring and hopeful, that I read it and it’s hard to breathe. Teaching itself is beautiful, but anyone who teaches knows the politics that come with it. Working under a Dean, dealing with HR, and trying to work within or teetering between often pointless politics can suck the life out of you. Reading such a paper can jolt you back to life. It can make you want to reach through the lines of the page and hug the person who filled them with such untainted literary bricks of gold. It happened recently. A student handed me a poem that wasn’t perfect, but it had some perfect pieces, and it had heart. We sat down and I began to tell him how taken I was with what he wrote. Maybe the next step could be working towards publication. This student is in school studying graphic design, but my interest in his work sparked some excitement.

Ms. G, do you think I could get all my poems together and write a book of poetry? I also have some short stories. Maybe I could get them all published. I could do comical essays like David Sedaris. Did you know he was on Letterman? I could definitely imagine myself being famous. Why would a graphic designer ever be on Letterman?

Fame and celebrity have a pull that affects all of us, and I don’t pretend to understand why. I just have observations, and things that I make sure I tell myself when identifying why something is important to me. Success in the grandest of senses doesn’t always mean fame. What is celebrity anyway?

THE GAME OF FOOTBALL begins for me in about 1983 or 1984. On my elbows and my stomach, legs stretched behind me on a pea green wall-to-wall carpet, I am three or four; my head is cocked; my mouth is slung open, and my eyes barely blink. On a 21" rabbit-eared Zenith, is a thrillingly simple smashing together of human bodies, which I for my part, believe I fully understand; it is the game of professional football, and it is the Cincinnati Bengals. Like everything that appears on that TV when the dial is chunked around to 5,9,12, or U, the bodies on screen are red, blue, and green dots in tiny triangles if I get close. I have been inching ever closer, wriggling forward, and now this is in my mind, and I stand up to confirm it again, and there they are again, tiny dots, red green and blue, just like in the Dukes of Hazzard; then there is a racket of male voices from behind. "He's standing in front of the television." "Hey Rob, the kid doesn't know what's going on." And my dad's voice, "Hey Matt, Mattie? Turn around. Hey, buddy, you gotta back off from the TV....That's it." I flop back down on the floor near my cousins, and there is a barb of awareness that I've just done something semi-public and dumb; it's a broader circle than the immediate mother and father; but it's fine; the dots are gone into the colorful, outsized men in helmets and pads; I am again watching the fantastic periodic choreographed colliding; our team is winning, and I'm clapping and yelling along with the rest.

In this, my earliest real memory of watching Cincinnati Bengals football [a looping GIF-like memory], what interests me are a few truly remembered seconds of watching the game. Maybe it's different for you, but a shame memory will sometimes leave the tape on for a few seconds or a minute; in my memory, black-shirted Bengals are driving a white-shirted, pale-helmeted team from right to left. And they are doing well at it. Of course I know now what I didn't then - that I was watching two of the great offensive linemen of the 1980s (Bengals left tackle Anthony Munoz and the lesser known but nearly as dominant right guard, Max Montoya) do their brutal work. But what interests me is the misunderstanding. In the memory, I am not yet watching the ball. Either I can't see it, don't know about it, or don't yet understand it as a focal point. Instead, I see something simpler, our Bengals, the good guys, the orange tiger-stripe helmeted, black shirted guys, lining up as a group and periodically slamming into the white shirted squad. Pushing them backwards alone constitutes success in this bewilderingly exciting and simple game called professional football; that is what I am cheering for. Their huddles are merely breathers, and an opportunity to get roused up, and when they're roused up enough, they clap their hands! And I clap my hands, because already I love those tiger-stripe-helmeted men! Oh, it's in me already. On some gut level, I am aware that the men on the screen represent me, represent us, father, grandfather, uncle, cousins, grandmother, mother, aunt (with a football helmet purse), and our place on a map. Far off, many many minutes away, in a stadium in downtown Cincinnati, they represent us, we who are just across the Little Miami in a room called a family room, and the MORE we love these Bengals on the screen, the MORE their deeds fire quicken our hearts, the MORE we feel, the more we win, the more we lose, the more we risk.

--

Somewhere deep in the memories of most fans of the game of American football is a mush like the one that I speak of, an almost primordial confusion of physical excitement, a wild aggressive jumble of intensity and bodies, and also, the sense of rooting for one side instead of another. If you were sitting across a table from me, particularly if you were a male 18-70 (forgive me), particulary if you hail from a place like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Green Bay, Kansas City, or Detroit, I'd here invite you to talk, tell me of that first mush, and how an understanding emerged from it. I think that by focusing on this mush, we might learn. Out of that first chaos of colliding bodies, America's most complicated, most specialized, and most popular professional team sport begins it's slow crystallization process. It is a process that has taken place in the minds of - if I might hazard a conservative guess based on Super Bowl ratings - one hundred million Americans, which is quite a few. For many of us, the process begins young. Very early as American boys (and increasingly as American girls) we learn this uniquely American game's strange rules, learn that the action stops when a player is brought down or leaves bounds, and learn that it starts again when the offensive center hikes the ball backwards; we learn that there is a clock, that the division of time is halves halved into quarters, that time is a resource that "runs out"; one team is trying to preserve it; the other is trying to erase it; we learn the concepts of down and distance, the various ways to score, the idea of field goal range and being within it; we learn the positions and their separate jobs; we learn that a team consists of an offense and defense, joined in a mutual interest, and that at higher levels, a player must choose a side; the levels that the game is played at (high school, college, professional) enter at some point, and we internalize the differences; in short, we learn the basics of a game that is a passion and a pastime for upwards of one hundred million people on our soil. Putting just a few out in prose reveals something: American football possesses quite a few basics - much more than any other sport; American football is as complicated as chess before the real complication even begins. Given the work of analysts like Ron Jaworski and Merrill Hoge in the last decade at explaining the x's and o's of the NFL to its audience; given our wider tv's; given our more intelligent sports talk radio; given the internet, fans today have an opportunity to learn more than any fans before. And with the NFL, it's easy to be caught up in the learning, because there is so much to learn; learning can be used for the purposes of gambling or for the sheer joy of itself...On a big flat rectangular contemporary TV, an NFL football fan that knows his personel and groupings can identify, for instance, that the Bengals defense has opened in a nickel on 1st down against the Patriots; he can see that the Patriots are themselves lined up in a power-I running formation with true fullback James Develin, and he can cry out in agony somewhat in advance of when he would have cried out if it were, say, 1965.

[CUT OUT: And we also learn to attach ourselves to certain players, and to the personalities of the players, which grow out of the positions, and attach us to positions. We learn that at the end of the one-and-done playoff at the end of the season, there is a game called the Super Bowl. Part and parcel with that, there is a first Super Bowl that every football fan can remember; like the bottom of a swimming pool, you can swim down and touch it, perhaps grab a few pebbles of it ("We ain't here to cause no trouble / We just here to do the Super Bowl shuffle!). Unfold the hand, and those pebbles are keys on a ring; they unlock whatever grade you happened to be in, whole colorful classrooms full of memories, a phase perhaps when your father wore a mustache, or your mother first had a streak of gray in her bangs.]

Where football is concerned, I am interested in the rudiments of the average fan's knowledge. I am interested in the child brain making sense of football; how does such a complicated game as American football get in? Unlike other team sports - soccer, baseball, or even basketball, football is a game that we experience from the outside long before we experience it from the inside (if we ever do). You must watch for some years before you can ever play in an organized way. With football more than other sports, to play the game in an unorganized way isn't really to play it, and the reason that you cannot play is that you are too young! As a very young American person, you are told this terrible truth over and over, and the game lives in the mind alongside such experiences as driving a car. Thank our post-Enlightenment concept of childhood, and I mean that seriously; in our society, there is an age-requirement for some activities on account of an inherent danger, and football happens to be classified as an inherently dangerous activity. But that children are kept from playing tackle football at young ages isn't due wholly to its violence. Football can be played with velcro flags on the hips, after all, and five and six year olds, lovingly padded, don't move fast enough to do much damage to one another. Rather, the game is simply far too complicated for small children. Even in its simplest forms, without quarterbacks attempting forward passes, it involves activities that are too specialized to be fun for tiny humans. "Hey four year olds, we're gonna play this really fun game with a ball, except you, Howie, you don't get to touch the ball, ever, because you already weigh 65 pounds, which makes you a lineman! Okay, now what we need you to do is all get in a line, and now the quarterback is going to say "Down! Set! Hut!" and on hut you and all the other heavy kids move at once, and push into that group over there..." No...football, like chess or contract bridge, is not a game for the youngest of our tribe. As a little person, your American football playing consists of playing at playing American football. By playing at football, what I mean is that you engage in low-risk games or activities that either increase the aptitude for the real game or develop the beginnings of the physical skills needed to play.

In my 1980s childhood, I remember three games or activities that "symbolized" American football or "played at" some aspect American football. The first was a game on a home computer. In my case, it was on a 1979 Texas Instruments job. No more powerful than a graphics calculator, but with a color monitor, that computer was already old technology when it was handed down to us, also in '83 or '84. Who cared? Not us. It had a keyboard, had a monitor, had a box full of power; you looked at it, and knew: that was a computer. In the primitive football video game that came with it, you were thrust into the role of coach and play-caller. You could select from several plays, running or passing, and then watch, wringing your hands, as helmet icons knocked against one another, and the plays played out. A tiny brown elipse, which was the ball, ejected from the quarterback helmet, traveled across the screen, and either magically wedged itself into the receiver helmet, or caromed off it enragingly, as if off a real helmet. You had no avatar on the field whose movements you directly controlled with your a joystick or directional arrows. Rather, you peered in like a paralyzed god or a coordinator in a booth or a parent in an audience, and watched your decisions succeed or fail without your ability to intervene. It was brutal on the nerves.

However, despite its crude simplicity, now that I think of it, this early '80s Oregon-Trail level game was strategically the most life-like of any football video game until those that have appeared lately. Unlike early incarnations of the John Madden franchise, where victory was as simple as nine-man blitzes and passing on four consecutive downs, (or "flipping the play," which threw all eleven members of the defense into a confusion), on this primitive Texas Instruments game, the programmers rewarded players with a Woody Hayes-like approach to the game. Imagine, people of the future: in the early 1980s there was a "3 yards and a cloud of dust" football video game. If you called passes on first down, you ended up with interceptions, incompletions, sacks, and holding penalties - the most infuriating and uncontrollable aspect of this little world. Oh yes! Folded into a black cartridge was the football intelligence and football ethos of a time late in the reign of Pittsburgh's Steel Curtain, one that perhaps looked ahead to the powerful offensive lines of the Redskins. From this game, this particular kid learned what a "blitz" was, what a "dive" running play was, what an "off tackle" play was; I learned about "sweeps," and saw guard icons pull on the sweeps (Max Montoya!); I saw receivers hitch, slant, cross, and run deep. From this game more than any source, I took the basics of football plays.

There were other games. On the floor of my parents' bedroom, I tried a few times to play what's known as "vibrating football" or "electric football." This particular game, which originally belonged to my dad, was one of the most disappointing toys ever sold by the tens of millions, and I honestly pitied him, thinking about him back in the 1950s, playing it. It consisted of a sheet of green metal painted to resemble a football field. Atop this sheet, two teams of tiny plastic men, about the size of "army men" stood in various football poses, a felt football about the size of a tic-tac under the arm of one of them. With the flip of a switch, electricty flowed, wires magnetized, a tiny electric motor whirred and buzzed and conferred enough motion to shake metal coils beneath to vibrating. The vibrations shook the sheet metal, causing the players above to quiver in way that supposedly led to movement. The problem was that they didn't move. They just quivered in place.

Perhaps this game could have been fun in several crooked NY apartments I've inhabited over the last decade. Orienting the board so that the incline tipped the game toward the advantage of the offensive side would cause at least the directionality that occurs in a football game. Gravity, symbolizing the rules of the real game, would help the offense take ground. Our house, however, apparently had "good flat floors," and as I child, I ddn't yet know about shimming. All I know is I attempted to play at this unfun game once with a fellow pre-schooler, a boy named Jeff, who was younger than I was by about 10 months. I lined up the men as they were lined up in my video game. Bored at watching me painstakingly align the men, he then laid the sides of his two hands down behind the lines and smashed the pieces together into a pile, growling and yelling something for about fifeen seconds, squeezing and tossing the little men: "No! THIS is football! Grwwwoorrwrwrorrr!!! GRRRRCKKCCK! Then they grrrrgg! Picckow!! Brrrrssshh!!!" By this point, I suppose here is a piece of evidence that I was getting out of the mush, but that mush was not so distant that I could see that he was still in it. Come along little friend! But you can't just say that and guarantee someone will listen.

---

A large joy of football, physically, is the joy of the football, of throwing and catching the football, of having it, holding it, tucking it, and running around with it. You toss it up in the air as a five, six year old kid; one second, playing, you are in the mind of a quarterback, in the next, a wide receiver. You stick the ball out into the air, you change your grip, and now you're a running back. To the outside, the picture is as simple as a kid throwing a ball up and catching it and running in circles by himself in a yard, but a fast and fluid role-playing is going on in his child-head. The joy of the football came into my life at about age five, but not in a yard, initially. In a house. In the house I grew up in. It was a low slung, but tough little house, and simply organized. The house was two floor, with two upstairs bedrooms, one large, one small. Three dormers looked south and east out of a pitched roof. Open the front door, and a short steep set of carpeted steps rose directly up the second floor, without a turn. When I was five, my old man, Bob, went down this flight of stairs suddenly and hard. In the way a cartoon character slips on a banana peel, his foot slipped forward and up on a sock (was it mine?), and his body followed his feet up into the air. He bounced twice on his lower back, and landed on the tiles of our entryway. I did not see it happen; I try to remember that it shook the house, but I could be imagining it. He stood up, walked out the door, and mowed the yard. The next morning he could not get out of bed. He'd shattered a pair of discs in his lower back, chipped up some vertebrae, and was informed he was lucky he hadn't end paralyzed.

At the time, Big Bob was 41 years old, 6'0" tall and 240 lbs. His frame was thick; he was big in the calves and the forearms and the thighs, big enough to acccommodate about 215 of those pounds; the remainder he wore as many men do - as a round, rock-hard, pot-belly, under which he buckled his pants. I was perhaps 45 lbs, with bones like the rubberized enamel bones dogs chew on; at age five, I used to slide and bounce down the stairs in every way I could figure to orient my body. I didn't quite get how he'd managed to hurt himself so severely by falling down those stairs, but he had. It was a climacteric event in our household.

After the surgery, while he was laid up in bed, he and I played. He lay on his back, propped up by pillows against a headboard, and I ran back and forth in about six yards of space, catching a small orange football rubberized football. He called out arbitrary numbers relating to the difficulty of the ball he was about to throw, and then he led me back and forth. To my increasing joy, he "threw me" all over that bedroom; the boundary of our field (where the highest scores were had) were on one end a bookcase full of psychology, chemistry, and biology textbooks, high school year books, photo-albums, and scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings of Big Bob's feats on the late 1950s Cincinnati public-high-school league grid-iron. On the other end was a closet door that we kept slid open, so that if ran too far in that direction, I'd collide with my mother's clothes, and not with a door. In that bedroom, I learn to catch the ball, and also to throw it. My dad couldn't move, but depending on where I threw it, he snatched it with either hand, like a hypercoordinated but immobile Star Wars hut. He was almost ambidextrous, one of those shoot-left, write-left, throw-right, bat-right, mixed-up handed people. He himself also loved every single kind of ball he ever met: golfballs, baseballs, basketballs, tennis balls, footballs, bowling balls, so it was a way of passing the time. He threw the ball back with whatever hand he caught it, on account of his back. "Right-handed!" I'd say, wanting him to transfer the ball to his better hand. Having not yet been to a batting cage, it was the most gloriously fun activity I'd yet experienced as a human being, and all while we threw, I asked him hundreds of questions - most of which had to do with football, the Cincinnati Bengals. Stuck in bed, he couldn't escape the barrage of attention.

[ANTS: Elsewhere in that bedroom at that time, my mother murdered tiny ants by the hundreds by licking lolli-pops, placing them on paper towels, and hiding them about the room. Inadvertently, I'd created an infestation. In my first experience with waitering, my strength gave out and I spilled a glass mug of hot jello the size of pitcher all over the bare wooden floor. I'd been attempting to carry it up to my dad in bed. Into the floor is a better description of how I spilled. I poured probably 48 oz of liquid hot red jello into our house, creating beneath the floorboards a cool goo as life-giving to tiny ants as petrie dish agar is to microorganisms. In the annals of Ants of the Ohio Valley, surely it's remembered as a boom town of legendary proportions; a whole way of life founded on a between-floor jello-layer! Ant Elysium! Anyway, these ants would march by the hundreds across my father's feet and ankles, and they'd end up glued as ant-mobs to the licked suckers. I remember it as a time of joy and laughter and all of us together in the same room, and a damaged father somehow in the middle of it.]

Anyway....to return to that dawning of the game of football in my fan mind, I'd like to throw another potato into the stew....the VCR. We were given our VCR in 1986 by father's older brother; oh goodness! it was a top-loading VHS in the time when VHS and Beta were in a two horse race for the industry standard. Had my uncle's family initially bought a VHS, then gifted it down to us upon getting a BETA? It's possible. That top loader, with its totally physical ejection mechanism, had the dimensions of a broiler drawer. Huge! It was huge. It was the oldest looking VCR I have ever seen, if appearance of age is defined by size and physicality. As a machine, it was analog as a 3-speed kitchen-blender, with buttons the size of piano keys; the buttons stayed engaged when you pressed them, and there was a button to pop the buttons out. A machine it was. It also worked better and more reliably than any VCR we ever had afterwards. Funny....Anyhow, the device's chief virtue, to my understanding back then, was its ability to capture a game or a program onto a tape, which made the tape an extraordinary and valuable thing, because it contained a game that could then be watched over and over, any time one wished. You put the television on channel 3. You selected on the VCR the channel on the TV you wanted, and you could record what was happening.

In the autumn of 1986, thanks to that VCR, I saw the NFL football game that would change everything for me, and make me somehow into what I already was: a Bengals fan of unusual intensity and positivity. Using the tremendous website Pro-Football Reference, I've been able to pinpoint the date, and pin the experience like a strange bug to my timeline. Monday October 13, 1986. The Cincinnati Bengals squared off at home against the bullies up the river, those "shitters into our drinking water," the smash-mouth Pittsburgh Steelers. It was a 1986 Boomer Esiason-led Bengals team two years and a few draftpicks from brilliance, and it was a Steelers team being led through one of its franchise's brief valleys by the dimunitive Bubby Brister; still, they were the Steelers. It was a Monday night game, which was a nationally telecast game. This meant the whole country would see our Bengals. In the opening segment, downtown Cincinnati's skyline, viewed from the Kentucky side, flickered and glittered, and I saw it with the sense that many more people in the world were seeing its beauty. Was I ready for some football? Electric guitars? Hank Williams Jr? Oh hell yes, I was. But it was 9:00 pm, and I was in the first grade, so I was sent to bed just after we proved our tape was working.

Why fight it? I made a plan to awaken at an ungodly early hour in the morning, enter the family room, rewind the tape and watch this Bengals game. As a small child, you can just tell yourself, "I'm going to wake up incredibly early," and then you somehow do, with no alarm. Up you pop into the sunshine, ready to do the thing you want to do. At around 5:00 am, before sunrise, I crept in there in a matching white suit of waffled thermal long-johns, stared down a rewinding tape, pressed play. To my great luck, I spent the next several hours privately viewing one of the most exciting regular season football games in the history of the NFL. Cincinnati Bengals and Pittsburgh Steelers: October 13, 1986. A back and forth contest of multiple lead changes, a safety, and huge momentum swings, none was larger or more unusual than a 4th quarter 61-yard touchdown run by Bengals punter Jeff "Clyde" Hayes. On what couldn't possibly have been a designed trick play, not from the Bengals own 39 yard line in a one score NFL game, the punter caught the snap, saw an opening he'd probably been looking at all game, and broke off around the left end. The man made no attempt to punt; he just ran, broke off like a housebound dog that's been eying an opening-and-closing door for a month; I am in NY without access to this tape; it is back in Ohio in a box, or maybe it long ago joined Mt. Rumpke - the region's #1 garbage destination. I wish I had it, and a VCR to play it, because I want it to be how I remember it, or I want to have remembered it wrong; either way, I'd like to know if that punter even pretended to try to punt....By the time Bengals' punter Jeff Hayes made his run for glory, the sun had come up on a Tuesday morning in Ohio; both parents had awakened, forced me to dress myself, and I was eating cereal. My dad, who was trying to get me into a car and drop me at school, was standing in the family room watching. He didn't know what would happen any more than I did. "What the hell! Oh! Oh! Go! He's off! He's off! Touchdown Bengals!!! Touchdown Bengals!!!!"

For the next six months, and my mother would corroborrate this, I woke up at a God-awfully early hour and watched this one particular game. Oh I had others. Not many, but a few. This tape though; this tape was the one. I rewound it. I replayed it. I did this over and over. Early in the morning, alone with the Bengals. I tried to communicate time by it. What time did you get up, Matt? "When it was 14-9, Bengals winning" or "When it was 14-7, Bengals winning." (That game had a safety.) Over and over. One game. What I remember is that lunatic punter tried to run a second time! He was of course stopped. What I also remember is Boomer Esiason punting it with his left foot, and actually punting it very well. What I can know is that already by that age, I'd internalized enough of football to know that a punter didn't typically run, and a quarterback didn't typically punt, and that is why I remember those plays 28 years later....All this strikes me as both obvious but also amazing....My father would peer into the game, which tossed out the same colors in same orders in his family room every day; he'd watch that punter run and shake his head. "If that isn't the damn dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life; Mr. Brown ought to fire that idiot; dumb." But the real truth of what that first grade person I once was saw was much simpler. In the game I had on tape, which at that age was more permanent, more real to me, than the fleeting contests on Sunday afternoons, the Cincinnati Bengals came out victorious every single time. Against great competition, against the PIttsburgh Steelers, they won upwards of a hundred times in a single year! This voluntary self-induced brain-washing is the only explanation for my continued attachment to the Bengals all through the "Revenge of Bill Walsh: Part II" (the 1989 Superbowl) and "The Klinglering Our Way to Kitna Decade."

[ So I will stop right there for a moment.

I ought to have stopped earlier, but where I had an impulse to stop wasn't exactly a stop sign; more like a large red leaf....Friends, I have not written prose in a very long time, except for emails, and I'm finding that objects are farther away than they appear. By objects, I mean topics I am trying to get to, and points I am trying to make...Early on in my guest bloggings, I used the word "symbolized" to describe the games that I played at as a kid that "played at" playing football....Paul Tillich, the 20th century's great Christian theologian, said that whenever a writer uses the word "symbol" in any form, be it as a noun ("symbol"), verb ("symbolize"), or adjective ("symbolic"), he ought to stop where he is and explain in detail exactly just what the heck he means. If he doesn't know what he means, that will be the first thing he figures out. I won't perform that boredom for you right now, because I've already typed more than enough for a first post.

Later on today, or later on this week, I'll go into some detail on an idea of the symbolic. The ideas won't be mine, but Tillich's, though they'll come out in my terms I imagine. I bring them up at all for the following reason: the application of Tillich's ideas on the symbol to the game of American football, coupled with a speculative meditation on the cardboard hang-tag messaging you find on any dog toy or cat toy ("All animals play at activities necessary to their survival"), bounced off some 18th century Trans-Allegheny American history, cause the the game of American football to take on a strange sheen...For though one can play at football in a video game, or a low risk game like "500," what does American football itself play at? To what more real activity does it point? I've done some thinking on this head, and I figured I'd make an investigation of that thinking the topic of my week guesting at the Best American Poetry Blog. There will with some asides on technology, a few scoops of Marshall McLuhan, tales of the Cincinnati Bengals of present and recent yore, an aside on the tradition of war games going back to Ancient Rome; also, maybe a little John Ashbery and Vergil (I like it with an "e") since it's a poetry forum after all. That's what you're in store of in this week of blogging. Blabbing? Blogging. I realize my topic: AMERICAN FOOTBALL AS A GAME OF AMERICAN WAR isn't for everyone. If I do my little job here, though, by Thanksgiving (three days away) a picture of a uniquely American war-game and the frightening historical reality that it symbolically re-enacts should have begun to emerge in a way that (hopefully) pleases a rational mind. You'll also learn more about the Cincinnati Bengals and the perspective of their fan-base than you perhaps ever want to know, and for that I apologize in advance. I apologize too for any typos, and randomly unfinished sentences. Have a wonderful afternoon and evening, everyone!]

July 23, 2014

When I was little, I liked to make lists of things: sports I liked to play, bands/singers I liked to listen to, R.L. Stein books I’ve read and have yet to read. It was all usually things I liked, things that sort of defined me at the time. Today, I was similarly moved to make such a list, but this time, of TV shows I like, ones that warrant binge-watching entire seasons at a time. I don’t quite know why I’m compelled in this way. Why is the act of making a list a pleasurable thing? Is it the thinking process, the discerning? The result, the seeing them all together? Once I’ve exhausted the obvious ones, I’m forced to think of ones I might have forgotten about otherwise, thereby perhaps reinvigorating the idea? Homage? Inclusion? (Exclusion?) Is it like creating a club and I’m the leader who gets to approve membership (like picking teams in grade school kickball)? Am I attempting to keep myself organized? If I write down every city I’ve ever been to, will I then know myself more fully? Am I better able to hold myself together after listing every film that has ever made me cry?

And following this list of questions, another— Why the list poem? Similar to my list-creating desire’s elementary origins, the list poem is a technique often introduced to the young writer as a handy image-compiling tool. Some primary school teachers ask their students to create list poems to introduce themselves to their classmates, or when poetry is brand new. It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s productive, straight-forward self-reflection. And all of these are assets to someone in her late 20s (or, anyone older than primary school age) too. The list poem enacts this youthful ease of compartmentalization, while engaging with the more mature task of exploring a thing from all its angles.

Catherine Bowman makes lists in “Sylvia’s Photo Album,” “Things To Eat, Paris, 1953” and her series of “Things To Do” poems, all from The Plath Cabinet. Susan Firer’s list poems include “Small Milwaukee Museums,” “Where Song Comes From,” and “The Wave Docent.” Paul Guest gives us “My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge,” “To-Do List,” and “Things We Agreed Not to Shout,” which is reproduced here:

Things We Agreed Not to Shout [by Paul Guest]

Mom is dead. Dad melted. Again.

Bitter recriminations. Bitter infidelities. Bitter.

Streisand is on. Finnish curses on the firstborn

of everyone who held us back. My credit rating.

Your many catalogs of shame. Scrapbook time.

Do you remember where we sank the kindergarteners?

Infectious constipation. In our spare time,

we enjoy perfecting methods of evisceration.

Bingo. Also, fire. Let’s make a baby.

Not anymore. You feel kind of weird inside.

My brother’s indiscretions. My indiscretion

with your brother. That lost weekend in Vegas.

Landslide of therapy. Moving to another state. Again.

We are running out of America. Faster.

Right there. Good girl. Judas Priest lyrics.

Freebird. Woo. Random latitudes.

Imagined injuries. Getting tired of your meniscus.

Seriously. Routing numbers

and decade by decade

delineations of your bra sizes. Beginning with the seventies.

You promised. I thought you were

asleep. I thought you wouldn’t mind it.

Surprise.

The list poem inherently invites the reader into its space. It asks for suggestions. What’s left out here? What could be added to this list? What kinds of things have you agreed not to shout? (To Guest’s list, I’d add, “Curse words at seagulls in the morning.”)

But there’s also a clear reason why the reader’s additions are not a part of the list already (so clear that it probably doesn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway): This is not my list. This list is a representation of the speaker at a particular moment in time. It’s possible that he might agree next week not to shout curse words at seagulls in the morning. But at the time of the poem, it wasn’t a defining piece of his character. Maybe it’s a piece of mine though… So maybe I’ll create my own list… And oh, another reason the list poem is so spectacular! The encouragement of new poems. And then, years after you write your own “things I’ve agreed not to shout” poem, you might write another one because maybe you’ve decided to start shouting at seagulls since then. It’s a wonderful process, really.

So I’m going to go make a list of all my favorite TV shows. Who really knows why. But when I’m done, the list will exist, and I will have it to look at and consider its implications, what it says about me as a TV watcher, an entertainment seeker, an American, a human being. And maybe I’ll never look at it again. Or I’ll make another list in 15 years because this list doesn’t define me anymore. Or maybe I’ll make a poem of it, like John Ashbery’s “They Knew What They Wanted,” a list poem comprised of film titles. And then he’ll write a poem in response to mine comprised of only TV show titles. And then… well, the list goes on, doesn’t it?

May 30, 2014

Casting Robert Morse as Bert Cooper, the firm’s senior partner, was an inspired move from the start. In the early 1960s Morse played J. Pierrepont Finch on Broadway in the Pulitzer-winning production of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. He rises from window-washer to chairman of the board in record time. It was the breakout hit of Morse’s career; it got him a Tony in 1962 and he reprised the role in the 1967 movie. Frank Loesser wrote the score, and Morse got to sing “The Company Way,” “The Brotherhood of Man,” the Groundhog fight song in a duet with Rudy Vallee, and the paean to self-love, “I Believe in You.”

So here he is, all these years later, playing the eccentric chief of the agency, who adores Ayn Rand, abstract art, and Japanese manners. He sports a natty bow-tie and well-tailored suits and makes you take off your shoes when you enter his domain. He is a detached figure but ready with the zinger when needed – as when he chews out Don for failing to take advantage of the media exposure when interviewed for the Wall Street Journal or when he intercepts the check that Lane made out to himself, forging Don’s signature. Among his more heroic moments was when Pete Campbell, righteously indignant, exposes Don as a counterfeit, an identity thief in the old-fashioned sense. Bert Cooper says, and I’m paraphrasing, so what. This is America.

Well, Robert Morse turned 83 years old on May 18, and on May 25, Bertram Cooper left the firm, the cast, the show, the planet, after uttering the one word “Bravo!” when Neil Armstrong gets out of the space capsule, takes his first step on the moon, and utters his winning line: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Bert expires and there is an announcement and the season is about to end, the managerial conflicts straightened out, the future of the firm secured by Roger Sterling’s brains and will, and Peggy’s presentation has won the new account (“Family Supper at Burger Chef”), and Ted will be coming back to New York because Don is leveling with him, mano a mano, and the deal is going to make all the partners rich, and Don is going back to his office when he hears a familiar voice calling his name.

“Bert?”

And standing there is Bert, or rather Robert Morse, the old song-and-dance man with the gleam in his eyes, singing the verse and then the refrain of “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” He does a nimble soft shoe, and dancing secretaries in mini-skirts join him on the floor. And with the air of having imparted words of valedictory wisdom, a blessing and a piece of advice, he sings, “The moon belongs to everyone, / The best things in life are free," exiting into his office.

And that’s how it ends, with Don alone at his secretary’s vacant desk. A very satisfying last shot, I felt, and not only because of my weakness for Depression Era songs. My mother used to sing this one, and the lines are perfectly apt for an episode organized around televised images of the moon-landing. The last words Roger says to Bert come from another song from that era, Irving Berlin’s “Let’s have another cup of coffee / and let’s have another piece of pie.” With his fear of failure coming to the fore, Roger mutters to Don that his last words to Bert were from a silly old song. He doesn’t specify which, but it is enough to give the hallucination a rational or Freudian explanation. But the beauty of the scene is its farewell grace – the sight of Robert Morse still hoofing and singing like his boyish old self. We’ll miss you, Bobby, but the show must go on.

At a time when the name Sterling is besmirched by the octogenarian owner of a basketball team, it is nice to see Roger Sterling pull a rabbit out of the hat and arrange for 51% of the firm to be bought by McCann, Ericson. Theoretically the acquisition will allow Sterling, Cooper to govern itself entirely, though that is not always how mergers and acquisitions work out in practice. This means that Don gets to keep his job and Roger gets to be president. Jim Cutler had sought to engineer a palace coup, with Don’s dismissal the first order of business, but in the end even he votes for the deal, which promises to make each partner a millionaire, in certain cases several times over. Joan is giddy with delight. Pete can hardly contain himself. When Jim Cutler’s hand belatedly goes up, he gets a quizzical look from Roger. “It’s a lot of money,” Jim says in his pitch-perfect deadpan.

To this white male it is heartening to be reminded that not all the dummies are men. Every once in a while, a woman comes along to drive a tractor in the office and sever an executive’s foot. So it’s pleasant when Meredith reveals herself as not just a gigglehead but a sentimental gigglehead. When she delivers bad news to Don, she jumps him. ”I know you’re feeling vulnerable, but I am your strength,” she says. Kudos to the writer of that line. “Tell me what I can do,” she adds, and Don's answer is a model of efficiency. “You can get my attorney on the phone, and we can’t do this” -- "this" meaning sex. I love it that in complying she says, “not right now.”

The most sophisticated of aviation projects is on everyone’s mind on July 20, 1969, which makes it a perfect day for Ted to take a couple of clients up in his plane, cut the engine, and frighten them half out of their wits. An inner voice in me says, “serves ‘em right,” though I have nothing against these particular Sunkist execs. We never find out what has made Ted not only moody and melancholy but morbid and evidently even on the verge of suicide in the existential manner that Albert Camus wrote about. Why, wherefore, and what's to come for Ted -- this is a story line we can anticipate. We can be pretty sure, too, that Nick, the handyman who has given Peggy his number, will return when the show picks up next year. And maybe Peggy will have more confidence, be less brittle, though it seems to be her destiny that each achievement is eclipsed by some greater event, as winning the Burger Chef business pales in significance to what happens in the partners' meeting. And, of course, there’s Sally to look forward to. The changes are coming fast. She is now a lifeguard who wears lipstick on her way to the pool, a stargazer in the backyard who kisses the son of Betty’s college chum and then, when the boy is summoned back into the house, smokes a cigarette in the exact pose of her mother. I don’t think she is going to Woodstock or to a major anti-war demonstration in Washington in the fall, but you never know. Betty’s friend declares that Sally looks just like her mother did in her freshman year at Bryn Mawr. Does that mean there is not one Don but two in her future?

Lines I wrote down:

“Pete’s pregnant, he has to do what we want” (Don).

“You’re just a bully and a drunk, a football player in a suit” (Jim Cutler on Don).

“No one has ever come back from a leave. Not even Napoleon. He staged a coup but ended up on that island” (Bert)

“Every time an old man talks about Napoleon you know they’re going to die” (Roger).

“That’s a very sensitive piece of horseflesh” (Pete on Don).

“He’s a pain in the ass” (Bert).

“I’ll have the obituary ready in an hour” (Joan).

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 6:21 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear David,

Delightful to read your take on the (halftime) season finale of Mad Men. As you know, the network decreed that this final portion of the series must be broken into two, seven episode halves, stretched across two seasons. And we’re seven episodes in. Therefore, we now face a dreary, Mad Menless interval of, how long, a year? in which to get cocktails and snacks from the kitchen till M.M. is on again, possibly gaining (in my case) 20 or more lbs before the show resumes. Sigh. Lead me to the ruffled potato chips, gimlets and cheesy poufs…

To begin with the episode’s close: I loved your description of that surprising song and dance performed (posthumously) by Bert and his bevy of fetching secretaries. As you put it “…the beauty of the scene is its farewell grace.” Indeed! Yes, firm founder Bert, capitalist extraordinaire, descends from heaven attended by a chorus of pretty amanuensis angels, singing about how the best things in life are free, right before the curtain falls on the episode (Bert’s curtain having already descended.) This after Bert having said in a previous scene, “Bravo!” which turns out to be his last utterance while alive. So it seems that Bert has presciently said “Bravo,” applauding his own lovely performance in the final scene! All this creates countless echoes, as you point out, reverberating back through Robert Morse’s career history and his character’s history across the run of the show so far. Pulling that unprecedented Dennis Potter (of TheSinging Detective fame) move of having Bert burst into an old timey song (albeit a newly dead Bert in an advisory visitation aimed directly at the show’s protagonist) was, for me, genius.

Home and family lost, found, exiled and reconfigured seemed to thematically dominate this episode, these being chief among the show’s recurrent obsessions. The title “Waterloo” (the big defeat which led to Napolean’s exile) was but one of a cascade of loss of home/exile references. Others might include the following. Don seemingly loses Megan for good, as she’s decided she does not want him to join her in California after all. Do you think she will change her mind next season? Betty’s family is temporarily enlarged by the clan of her college chum taking up residence as houseguests, creating a new, larger “blended” family (to whom Betty is about to serve, in one lightning fast shot, a huge platter of rubbery looking fried eggs. The eggs unsettlingly resemble a pile of eyeballs a la St. Lucy. Or are they a fertility symbol? Will Betty become pregnant by current hubby Henry next season?)

Julio, chubby young son of Peggy’s tenant, is moving to Newark, thus losing his home away from home in Peggy’s apartment, to which he is ever escaping for popsicles, TV, solace, etc., AND his home in NY.The little boy weeps in her arms, sobbing that his mother doesn’t love him. Peggy tears up too, maybe thinking in part of the baby she gave away years ago. Was it a boy or a girl? Where is its home now? Will her son or daughter’s adoptive parents seek her out next season? (The open adoption movement gets going around 1970, so the infallible internet tells me.) Roger’s fragmented family is watching the moon landing, like everyone else in the episode. Wearing a toy space helmet, Roger’s grandkid Ellery looks dazed, having lost his mother to the clutches of an upstate commune. We get images from multiple wavery black and white TVs of the Apollo 11 astronauts, far from their home planet, setting boot on the moon. The family of McCann, Erikson is apparently going to marry into and blend with the family of Sterling, Cooper. The agency loses its founder/ “father,” Bert, who finds a home in heaven among talented, glamorous secretaries, as previously mentioned. Roger Sterling becomes the new Sterling Cooper “dad,” patriarch in Bert’s stead. Ted is pressured into relocating (again) for the good of the Sterling Cooper family. So he’s coming “home.” Is he returning to Peggy’s embrace? Or will he find her in the arms of the beefcakey home improvement handyman who was manfully repairing her apartment ceiling?

In a tiny odd detail, did you sense any echo of Othello when ditsy secretary Meredith makes a play for Don after tearfully informing him he’s been fired? He gently rebuffs her advance and hands her his handkerchief to dry her eyes. She pulls herself together and attempts to return his hanky (disappointingly for her, sans panky) but he doesn’t take it back, so she leaves with it. The handkerchief gambit reminded me faintly of the role of the stolen handkerchief as false evidence of infidelity, and its fatal results, in Shakespeare’s play.

Next season (since we have PLENTY of time to speculate, David) what would you like to see happen on Mad Men? Here’s my rather unimaginative shortlist:

*Ginsberg’s return

*more Joan

*Sally has sex

*Roger falls in love

*Trudy remarries

*Bert’s ghost returns for an encore from time to time, delivering a musical number aimed straight at Don when he needs it (corny, I know, and excessive, but I can’t help it.)

May 24, 2014

Twinnings: parallel lines that meet somewhere between the cross-country plane and the clouds above. I'll list a few.

Peggy has just turned thirty, and Joan is nearing forty. No fear could quite compare with the fear of becoming an old maid.

On the flight back to LA are Megan and Pete’s fuck-bunny Bonnie, for whom Pete is not quite Clyde enough, and both are disconsolate for one reason or another.

Stephanie Paterik tells me that when Roger and daughter rough it in the Catskills, Dad and offspring adopt identical sleep postures. That was two episodes ago.

And this week, when the episode concludes with Don and Peggy and Pete at a Burger Chain, their formation echoes the visual configuration of Ted, Peggy, and Pete a year earlier at the airport lounge where they sit and everyone but Ted laughs, because everyone but Ted has been drinking whisky sours, and Ted is about to fly them in his little plane and catch hell from his wife -- only in the Ted episode it's a triangle and here it's more like Don and Peggy on one team and Pete on the other.

Prejudices persist. When Bob Benson bails out the handcuffed GM executive who “tried to fellate an undercover police officer,” the cop on duty says, “good night, ladies.” And when Bob – the only character who looks good in a plaid jacket – says he “struck out” yesterday when looking for a suitable present for Joan, her mother pipes up: “The Jews close everything on Saturday.”

This one-time shomer Shabbat yeshiva boy wonders: can the office be as judenrein as it was back in the benighted days of 1960? Gone are Ginsberg, to the loony bin; likewise the secretary who married Roger, took acid with him, won a big divorce settlement, and why can’t I remember her name? And then there's the latter's cousin, the pint-sized copywriter who went west, grew facial hair, went Hollywood, and after enduring one taunt too many, socked Roger in the solar plexus in season six.

Is Megan having an affair? Stacey said so as soon as she heard Don offer to bring a suitcase of her stuff (a fondue maker!) when he visits her next in LA, end of July, to which she replies she’d like them to meet somewhere else – “Not LA, not here, just us.”

The episode centers on Peggy and how she will handle the creative work for the national Burger Chef campaign. Pete imagines he is praising Peggy when he says there isn’t a better woman in the ad business – but she, and we, hear it as a left-handed compliment. Though the presentation gets Lou's approval, she knows there is something wrong with her family-friendly sequence of guilty mom, indulging dad, and hungry kids in the car. So what does she do? Light up a cigarette, have a drink, chew out an associate – just like the master himself.

Everything leads up to the heart-to-heart with Don. “Now I’m one of those women who lie about their age. I hate them.” She wonders, “What did I do wrong?” He answers, “You’re doing great.” In an epiphany that doesn’t quite announce itself as such, she asks, “Does this family exist anymore?” by which she means the family toward which she has pitched her ad – a family that eats as a group rather than watching television alone together. “What if there was a place you could go and there was no TV and you could break bread and anyone you were with was family?” And then on the radio comes the familiar opening chords of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way,” his mega-hit of 1969. “And now the end is near.” And Don and Peggy dance. (Will they end up together? Maybe, said Ron and David. No way, said Yoav and Stacey.) But taking her cue from the familiar voice, she will do the ad her way.

The literary allusion in the last scene is masterly. Pete and Peggy and Don sit at a Burger Chef. In a way each is a loser (and remember, even Sinatra in “My Way” says he is “tired of losing”), they come from very different backgrounds, yet they form a sort of family. She is going to have her ad shot here, because, she tells Pete, it’s “a clean, well-lighted place.” “Okay, Hemingway,” Pete has the wit to reply. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” one of Hemingway’s finest stories, the setting is a café in Madrid, where men in quiet desperation go to drown their sorrows. They believe in nothing, they do the most drastic things, like trying to take their lives, for nothing, because nothing matters. Nada. In one of Hemingway’s bravura performances, the word “nada” orchestrates a paragraph. In the mind of the waiter closing the café at two in the morning the word “nada” replaces the nouns in the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.”

It is the use of one literary allusion to counter another: Lou (who, according to a friend of mine, an advertising veteran, is the most believable character in the whole show) has responded enthusiastically to the original ad Peggy drew up for Burger Chef. “It’s good to see family happiness again,” he says, and the line’s true significance becomes clear when you take it into account that “Family Happiness” is the title of a novella by Tolstoy.

The ironies are multiple. An American fast-food joint takes the place of the Spanish café with the zinc bar and the brandy drinks that sound so exotic in a foreign tongue. Yet the nihilistic desperation is the same, even if Don, Peggy, and Pete smile gamely in the artificial camaraderie of their work.

There's my report, dear Amy. And I never even got around to Joan’s defiant response to Bob Benson’s proposal.

-- DL

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 9:17 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear David,

(You continue to field musical and literary allusions popping up in our favorite show with the alacrity of a legendary outfielder, a Raul Mondesi, or perhaps a Dusty Baker.) THE FAMILY EPISODE:(could this theme have been writ any larger?) We began this episode with Peggy and cute, nerdy male office minion doing market research in the Burger Chef parking lot after sundown. The scene looked very B movie-- shadowy, streetlit. A beleaguered mom with kids roiling in back seat of her car hurriedly answers Peggy’s queries about her family’s fast food habits, eyes glued to the ten dollar bill she’s been promised. The birth of the focus group? Oh, America, whither thou goest?! So Peggy starts on the outside, standing uncomfortably, peering into a car in a dark, trying to keep her voice smiley and bright whilst gripping her clipboard, straining to get the data she needs. As you point out, by episode’s end she has moved into the light, sitting in the blindingly over-lit Burger Chef interior, in a booth with a pair of key members of her work “family.” The man who she lost her virginity to, whose baby she bore and gave away (Pete) and the man who has been her symbolic father, her mentor, who she desperately wants to be (Don.) Don’s small, wordless motion to Pete in the last moment of that scene, indicating to that egotistical blockhead (Vincent Kartheiser is soooo brilliant at playing narcissism) that he has a smear of catsup on his upper lip, is beautiful. It’s familial, intimate, and at the same time a bit condescending and smirky.Speaking of family, Joan bravely fends off a marriage proposal from a gay colleague, Bob Benson, who wants her to be his “beard.” His offer to make a kind of alternative family with her, and be a father to her tiny son, while allowing both adults to pursue separate sex lives, doesn’t appeal to her. “We could comfort each other through an uncertain world,” Bob says, coaxingly. He even offers her a ring, a sort of image rhyme with the notorious scene in last week’s episode, in which poor demented Ginsberg, now in the loony bin, offers Peggy his lopped off nipple in a little jeweler’s box. Bob’s proposal quickly turns to a less-than-kind hard sell when Joan balks. “I am offering you,” Bob says rather loftily, “more than anyone else ever will.” I found Joan noble in this scene. “No, you’re not,” she demures, “because I want love, and you should, too.” Joan’s hard-won dignity is a radiant element of her considerable beauty.Speaking of the varieties of love (or high altitude lust): Pete and his paramor Bonnie’s retreat into an airport bathroom at 30,000 feet for a quickie put me in mind of a paperback that was in heavy rotation amongst Junior High school girls I knew back in 1969, the year this season of Mad Men takes place. The book, which came out in 1967, is Coffee, Tea or Me. It purported to be a memoir chronicling the sexual adventures of a pair of randy young stewardesses. Later, the “memoir” was revealed to be the concoction of a PR dude called Donald Bain. Predictably, we pre-teen and teenage girls were ravenous all during secondary school to get our hands on any book that mentioned sex. The Happy Hooker (1971), The Godfather (1969, I forget which specific chapter, none of us read any other parts of the book, I’m afraid) and The Harrad Experiment (1962) were a few of the extracurricular titles that joined the immortal Coffee, Tea or Me on our secret mandatory reading list. I do have a growing fear that someone in this series is going to die in plane crash. Sometimes I read the gorgeous opening/credits sequence, where Don is falling, falling, falling, that way. I hope I am wrong.Stan is wearing love beads to the office! I still think he has a yen for Peggy. They seem to understand each other on deep levels, and perhaps it’s symbolic that during a phone conversation about work Stan is eating a banana and his shirt is open to his navel. I know everyone and their cousin thinks that Peggy is going to sleep with Don. Maybe she will. I think she should sleep with Stan. There. I’ve said it. If only Stan could have been a fly on the wall, an invisible witness to the scene in which Peggy, unable to sleep because she knows she has to totally rework the Burger Chef pitch, does a sexy little jog across the room when she gets up in her semi transparent nightie, he might not be able to hold back any longer.Later in the show, Pete grumbles, “I hate the word family.” Well may he say so. He has been absent from his little daughter Tammy’s short life so long she doesn’t recognize him. When he comes to visit, she refuses to come out from behind her nanny’s skirts, and is frightened of him as she might be of an intruder. Pete waits around after his paternal visit, after putting his daughter to bed, for ex-wife Trudy to come back from a date, getting smashed on her booze. He confronts her drunkenly and is so belligerent she eventually says, “You’re not a part of this family anymore.” Footnote one: Correspondent Benjamin Weissman informs interested viewers that actor John Slattery, who plays Roger Sterling, looks buff in his steam room scene this episode because he’s a real life surfer. For his own safety, we hope Mr. Slattery wears more than a gym towel when riding the big waves (there are SHARKS out there, John!) Speaking of sharks, the dialogue in that steam room is pretty vicious, quite biting.Footnote two, in closing speaking again of family: My mother in law as absolutely swooning over the scene where Don and Peggy slow dance. OOOOh, she sighed. He was so tender with her. She seemed so overcome that I ran to the medicine cabinet for the smelling salts, in case they were needed, but that wonderful lady kept her head. That’s all till next week.

-- Everyone hates Lou, the boss from hell, whom most of us know all too well, and how awful will he get?

-- Lots of people are wondering “how Don will die,” as if his death were a foregone conclusion and all that is in question is the means: will he jump from a tall building or turn into a drug-addled beach bum wasting away and finally drowning one summer day in some shabby Florida town?

-- Why did the magnificent Jessica Parre, toothily grinning, pose nude in a swimming pool and panty-clad in the kitchen for an Esquire photo shoot?

As you are not featured in the episode, my dear Joan, it was awfully kind of you to come over and watch it with us, knowing, as you did, that questions one and three would answer themselves. Here, as promised, are the notes I took, the observations you and I and Stacey made, so you can share them with Bob Benson.

I notice that Don spells out “strategy” to open the episode, which closes with his unexpected appearance at a strategy session for a cigarette manufacturer at the Algonquin.

Stacey, also present, gets points for noting the symmetry in wifely party-giving: Betty Draper throws one and so does Megan Draper, on different coasts, with different costs, casts, and results.

Speaking of symmetry, when Lou sadistically keeps Don from taking his flight to Los Angeles, he says he’s going to “tuck you in” for the night – the same locution used by Megan’s friend Amy when she initiates the threesome with Megan and Don after the party in LA, where he flies to comfort his niece – that is, Anna Draper’s niece, Stephanie, seven months pregnant – but whom he never sees, because Megan, jealous of the affection her husband has for the girl, sends her on her way, albeit with a check for a thousand dollars. “I know all his secrets,” Stephanie artlessly says, pushing Megan over the edge.

You were right, Joan: when you consider the sexual shenanigans, it’s hard to get worked up over the Esquire photo shoot. Anyway, even at her meanest, Megan is a lot easier to take than Betty, on whom Henry finally loses his temper. Betty remains in favor of the war in Vietnam when even Nixon goes on record wanting it to end.

Lou, sealing his status as a certified asshole, turns out to be a cartoonist (“Scout’s Honor”), who compares himself to Bob Dylan (!), rhetorically asking a room of incredulous associates, “Is he hip enough for you?” And then to clinch the deal: “You’re a bunch of flag-burning snots.” Ugh.

“Hip,” also “out of sight,” “bread,” “solid,” “dealing grass,” are among the week’s linguistic markers, and Amy says she is going “to split” meaning “to leave” the morning after she and Megan and Don share the connubial bed. As for fashion, there are the hideous plaid sports jackets that even Don dons, and Harry Crane sports an ascot where a tie should go, while a bearded Stan, joint in mouth, wears a bandanna in the same place.

But more on Lou, whom I dislike so much I feel sorry for friends of mine named Lou who spell it that way. Best line of the night comes when Lou, disgusted with his whole staff, asks Don whether he should let them all go (whether for the night or for good). “I’d let you go, Lou,” says our dapper hero (in real life an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan, but we who root for the Dodgers or Mets won’t hold that against him.) The sadistic shithead leaves the office and lets Don know that he can wait until Monday for the work, after all.

Oh, those days of joints everywhere, of Blood, Sweat, and Tears on the radio, of musicians who drop out of Berkeley and get busted for dealing dope, of adult content and sexual situations, of girls wearing hair bands or sword-fighting with golf clubs, and, alas, of guys named Ginsberg who flip out and get carted off to the nut house. Cutting off one of his nipples and presenting it to Peggy in a gift box takes the cake for sincere craziness. But in this very satisfying episode, he is also responsible for perhaps the cleverest most ‘69 moment, so to speak. It happens when he spies on Cutler and Lou talking and watches their mouths move, imagining what they are saying – just as Hal the computer reads the astronauts’ lips in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, released in 1968 but on wide screens everywhere a year later.

Joan, I do not think Don is going to jump out of a window, or die on a deserted beach. I think we get a glimpse of his future when he barges into the Algonquin and offers to resign from the firm if it means the Philip Morris account. And then he turns into Don Draper, the man who can sell any concept to any executive, who has worked ten years on tobacco and is the only cigarette man who has conferred with the opposition and arranged a “stay of execution” for the industry in 60, in 62, in 64 and 65. Makes my hand go reflexively to my breast pocket and pluck out an unfiltered Lucky to light up.

Yours in sincere admiration,

Dapper Dave, author of “The Drape(r)s of Roth”

PS Speaking of nipples, did you see Rihanna’s on Instagram?

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 11:26 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Mad Men “The Runaways.”

I am worried sick about Ginsberg. I fear our resident, wisecracking Jew is going to be subjected to shock treatment, and perhaps thereby be silenced, leaving an entirely goyishe office. He has been descending into something like paranoid schizophrenia since the season began. (Wonderful acting job by Ben Feldman!! Looks like he’s lost weight, his face intermittently flushed as though he were coming down with scarlet fever, and he seemed persecuted even by his own dark, handlebar mustache, as though by some tarantula.) As you recounted, poor Peggy had to be the one to make the call and have him hospitalized, after he sliced off his nipple and offered it to her in a bracelet box. Peggy being an (ex?) Catholic, there was something straight out of the lives of the martyrs about that self mutilation / lovingly proffered body part (which made Peggy scream.) The later shot of her puffy, pink, tearstained face as she watches Ginsberg being rolled down a hospital hallway, strapped to a gurney, still wildly gesticulating and blabbing, gave us a glimpse of a former, more tender-hearted Peggy I have to admit I miss, though I well understand it’s better for dramatic development, for intensity of character and storylike, etc. etc. if she continues on her path of becoming Don’s Dark Sister. But when was the last time Peggy looked sorry for or fond of anyone? It was high time. (There’s still no silver bullet for treating schizophrenia, if that’s how Ginsberg ends up getting diagnosed, and back in 1969 options were fewer and grimmer. Will he be forcefed Thorazine? (Lit Footnote, just cuz I looked this stuff up: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published in1975, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar didn’t come out in the US till 1971, after it’d appeared in England at first under a pseudonym.) I was hoping it would to come light that Ginsberg had merely been dropping tons of acid. Alas, it appears to be something more insidious. (All this evokes, as you so rightly note, another family of highly verbal, east coast Ginsberg’s travails.)

Mad magazine (who can resist this confluence of Mad Men and Mad magazine) but felt that the most spot-on reference, to George Baker’s Sad Sack, remained unmentioned. There’s a giddy, cruel, boyish, schoolyard atmosphere that pervades these scenes. The school bully (Lou) is found out to have a vulnerable point (his secret life as a comics artist) and for a while the younger boys of the creative team take merciless, giggling advantage, unable to stop mocking him behind his back (or so they think) even while taking a leak (the revelation of the sketches being an inadvertant “leak” of another sort, I suppose.)

AND: Here’s a toast to Betty’s contribution to the ‘progressive dinner,’ where guests move from house to house to sample various courses (at which she demonstrates her decidedly unprogressive politics! as you noted, situating herself to the right of even 1969 vintage Richard Nixon, not to mention her politically ambitious husband.) Oh! but I drink here to the fussy and disgusting foods of the era: crab louie on toast points (not so bad), rumaki (one of the grossest culinary inventions of all time, in the opinion of this lifelong liver-hater) and “little franks in barbeque sauce” (not recommended by the surgeon general). For the uninitiated, since I’m old enough to remember rumaki and to have been severely traumatized by it (“Just taste it! That’s all you have to do…”) here’s a typical ingredient list for that dreaded hors d’oeuvre (in case you think I’m harshing Betty’s buzz unnecessarily.) a 4 oz. can of water chestnuts, drained and sliced 1 cup teriyaki sauce 1/2 teaspoon minced fresh ginger root 12 ounces fresh chicken livers, halved a teaspoon of minced garlic12 slices bacon 1 quart oil for frying

There are recipes aplenty online if this appeals to you. ENJOY!

Sally’s broken nose seems a symbolic precursor to loss of virgnity. Was she telling the truth about how it happened? I liked the intimate scene between her and younger brother Bobby if for no other reason than we’ve never really seen them join forces before. Sally’s escaped to boarding school but poor Bobby is stuck watching his beautiful, angry, twisted up mother smolder and fume through the ides of her second marriage and grow restless in the throes of a kind of incipient feminism which is not reacting well with her knee jerk reactionary tendencies. “I have a stomach ache all the time” Bobbie says to his big sister in a small voice, and “the other night they were really screaming at each other.” Poor kid.

I am jonesing for more Joan. Not happy when she’s absent. I am wondering if the appearance of Don’s pregnant hippie “niece” (speaking of plot harbingers) is somehow a teaser for the fact that Megan will find herself pregnant before the series is through. I hope Don doesn’t die at all, and especially that he doesn’t die of lung cancer. I LOVE the way he whistles for a taxi.

Till next week! I am already having withdrawal symptoms! How can there be so few episodes left this season????

May 10, 2014

Is Don done? Has he reached rock bottom or just the bottom of a borrowed bottle of Smirnoff's from the desk of Roger Sterling? What do you think lies ahead for our hero? I'll think about that myself, while waiting for your answer.

The psychedelic posters that pop up, the Milton Glazer imagery, remind me that I was a confused twenty-year-old that year, clever though naive, easily wounded, stunned by adulthood on the one hand and by the rapidly changing cultural expectations of kids like me, sloganeering to make love not war (whether actually able to do either very well). Gertrude Stein wrote that "in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others." I see the hippies in the commune upstate, where Roger Sterling visits like an alien in a blue blazer, and see myself in both halves of the antithesis -- as one of the bearded granola eaters but also as the silver-haired ne'er-do-well who smokes weed with the young kids but would attend the campfire in a jacket and tie. I see myself in both groups and like myself in neither and the 1960s are coming to an end.

It is, we are reminded insistently, 1969, year of anticipated miracles (the moon landing, Woodstock) and unexpected ones (Chappaquiddick, and the erstwhile hapless New York Mets managed by Gil Hodges will win the World Series). Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint," in its distinctive yellow cover, is the novel of the year and naturally Don Draper is reading it. And as the computer invades the office, I wondered whether the history lesson was getting the better of the fictional energy in the "Mad Men" dialectic. When Stan tells Ginsberg that the computer, a space-occupying contraption that a bunch of electricians are installing, is or is fated to be "the Mona Lisa," the statement makes a point not only about the coming primacy of the computer but also about the persistence of the "Mona Lisa" as the apotheosis of high art vaulted into highest eminence. You think of how Duchamp put a mustache on the Mona Lisa, that T. S. Eliot said that ""Hamlet" was "the Mona Lia of literature," and you realize the weight the writers are putting on Stan's simple sentence. But maybe you also wonder whether all these historical markers are taking the place of drama.

Has the series lost some of its energy? Let's take a long view. We have a lot of characters and some of them are stagnant. Peggy. downing a shot, has no romantic life to speak of. If Joan does, we don't know it. Megan and Betty are off-stage. Pete, looking creepy in sideburns, has a Betty-type blonde on his arm, his real-estate agent. What does she see in him? I say, shrugging. He is the conduit to a brand-new national campaign for Burger Chef. Yes, the 1970s, decade of hamburger chains, is upon us.

Roger and Mona get back together for a failed mission. They fail to rescue daughter Margaret, who has abandoned husband and daughter to become a communard in the Catskills. Mona thinks Margaret has been "brainwashed" and Margaret insinuates that her mother, to get by, has to lock herself in the bathroom with a pint of gin. Roger is willing to giving it more of a shot. He smokes dope with the kids, sleeps in a sleeping bag outside beside his starry-eyed daughter, but for one night only. "I'm tired of accepting society's definition of me," Margaret says in the showdown scene with her parents, and I flinch. Yes, conversations like that were taking place all over. But there was an intellectual element and often a political one in the rebellion and if it would be unrealistic to expect the fictional Roger and Mona to understand it, you wonder whether viewers are in any better position to do so.

As to Don, I have never seen him in such despair. He gets drunk, nothing unusual about that, but acts drunk, as he never used to; gets belligerent as never before. Will Freddy of AA-fame -- Freddy who once disgraced himself by peeing in his pants in public -- be our boy's salvation? Freddy gives him a good talking to, and the next morning a clean-shaved Don can assure Peggy that he will meet her deadline. It is possible that he can accept the role-reversal, accept that his one-time subordinate is now his boss, and shine when the opportunity arises. But I get the feeling that fate, or Matthew Weiner, has something more dramatic in store.

David

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 11:48 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear Professor Lehman, Doctor d’toutes choses Mad Men:

THE SCOTTISH PLAY (Thank you for teaching me the word “communard!”) But let’s begin at the beginning. The episode opens with Pete and his sharky blonde bombshell real estate peddling girlfriend (who, as you astutely point out, could be Betty Draper’s sister) eating dinner on a lantern lit restaurant terrace. Bonnie seems poised to play Lady MacBeth to Pete’s MacBeth. She’s all shimmery ambition, greed and goading. “I love watching you work” she purrs when she thinks Pete’s made a cagey business move at the restaurant. (Weirdly, Pete just seems embarrassed and starts stammering. What’s up with that?) In her, Pete has a consort that’s as snaky, maybe even snakier, than he is. I loved his ex wife Trudy and miss her, but she was Pollyanna to his Machiavelli. Pete needs a ruthless babe who can hold her own with him.

RED EPISODE(S) This episode seemed like the RED episode to me. I feel I am just waking up out of some dizzy, plot obsessed stupor to the amazing uses of color in Mad Men (the word “MAD” in the logo always appearing in that arresting red.) The same RED or thereabouts is the splashy color, only a little faded, of the New York Mets pennant Don finds under the desk and hangs on the wall in his new office, which is Layne’s old office (and Layne hung himself there.) The red couch that Ginsberg wants to salvage at all costs from the repurposed “creative lounge” where the huge new computer is being housed is a symbolic point of contention in this episode. The main figure in the Milton Glazer poster you noticed is red. Roger’s grandson Ellery (visiting the office because his mother has run off to a rural commune upstate, hence the term “communard” deftly lobbed by you, professor) is clad in bright red overalls. On the famous Portnoy’s Complaint book cover you cited, author Phillip Roth’s name appears in Mad Men red. Burt has a huge red Mark Rothko painting in his office. Etc. Etc. No doubt I am one of the last Mad Men obsessives to be jolted by this assaultive repetitive red. Or maybe they are all utterly different reds my TV screen homogenizes to seem like the same shade?

BUMMER? The only false note in this episode for me is when Burt angrily blows off Don’s suggestion that the Lease Tech dude installing the block long computer in the office (Lloyd) is ripe for a pitch...so someone should pitch him. The guy wants to start advertising his growing-like-wildfire business. I can readily believe that Burt is so furious with Don for past fuckups that he would rebuke Don at first blush, saying that he’s on probation and isn’t allowed to bring in new clients. What I had a hard time swallowing is that Burt would go further: refusing Don’s subsequent suggestion to go ahead and allow someone else to try to land Lease Tech, if Don’s banned from trying to reel in new biz. Instead, Burt acts like he doesn’t care about a fig the prospect of landing this potential client, like he’s offended by the very idea. That doesn’t seem like Burt at all: ignoring a lucrative account begging to be snagged. But I have infinite faith in Matt Weiner. Perhaps Burt is only waiting to spring this idea at the next partner’s meeting, leaving Don out of it entirely, further humiliating Don and taking all credit for himself?

I LOVE FREDDIE Will he drag Don off to Alcoholics Anonymous? To what effect? Great acting job, full of rumpled heart and slightly fumbly subtlety, by Joel Murray. I love that this reformed alcoholic character is named Freddie Rumsen. (RUM- SIN)

RURAL RUMINATIONS AND DADDY’S GIRLS The farm visited on a school field trip in a previous episode seems to have paved the way (or smoothed the dirt road) for the rural commune in this one, complete with soft chicken cluckings on the sound track. And yes, one theme of the episode currently under discussion, if this isn’t too heavy handed an observation, mon professor, is The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost. Don is being made to pay handsomely for previous sins, again and again. It seems everyone at the office is against him. Roger: heedless hedonist, profligate, selfish, famished to taste all of life’s experiences, has sired a daughter who’s a chip off the old block, and he doesn’t like it one bit when she start to emulate him. She’s very much daddy’s girl, as Sally Draper, Don’s daughter is also her father’s daughter, bold, perceptive, intelligent, headstrong, capable of canny deception or searing honesty, intensely independent, etc. And Peggy seems as though she is trying to BE Don, her erstwhile mentor, god help her, so I count her as another form of daddy’s girl in the series. Peggy’s hitting the bottle at work, Don-style. She’s enjoying lording over her former boss (sadly, many a daddy’s girl has taken this attitude toward a formerly domineering daddy laid low.) I could stretch this idea even thinner and say that there are ways in which Joan, arguably Roger’s protégé, is another breed of daddy’s girl. She has some of Roger’s objectivity, and has maybe even improved upon it. Roger, after all, is not only Joan’s former mentor but the real daddy of her son.

Parenthetically: The actress who plays Roger’s runaway daughter Margaret (communard name: Marigold) is wonderful, don’t you think, professor? This episode is just about first time we’ve seen this character smile! She seems utterly transformed, pretty hair flowing down her back. Gone are the uptight bun, the designer clothes. She looks and sounds and moves like a completely different person from the sourpuss pill box hat wearing debutante we’d known.

EWWWW Is anything more horrid than the patronizing way Lew addresses girls and women as “sweetheart?” And he has inflicted Don and Peggy on each other hoping that they will both “implode.” Chained them together like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones.” Lew’s a great villain. I can barely look at him.

This is the voice of Don Draper offering you "exceptional deals" on the Mercedes of your dreams. Our "breakthroughs in design" are sure to capture your custom in competition with the other cars that are paying for our time this week: Audi, the Ram 1500 truck from Dodge, Lincoln town cars, and 2013 Hondas. Take that, fat vulgar Jersey Jaguar-dealing fucker of Joan.

Speaking of cars, I see Trudy getting into a town car just to go half a block home. Still the princess, and what glorious heels, and did I really hear her order "a deconstructed martini"? From one point of view, any martini using vodka rather than gin can be said to have been deconstructed but that's a technicality. She's selling Smirnoff though I think it would be as true of Belvedere and Grey Goose. But that's just me. I believe Roger drinks vodka martinis. Back in the day (before "back in the day" was idiomatic) he specified Wolfschmidt's as his brand of choice. Imagine that.

The inevitable happens right on schedule. The marriage cannot last, but Don, content to let things be, makes Megan announce the demise just as he had done previously with Betty and Sylvia. He does reject Faye, of course, but usually he likes it when the girl says goodbye and cries on the phone and looks as elegant and cool as Megan Draper in Los Angeles.

Is Don back at the agency? He has done what anyone wanting a raise is advised to do: get an offer from another firm. I have never seen Roger Sterling so animated as when he speaks in passionate defense of Don. He resorts to legalisms. We didn't fire him, we put him on leave. It is up to the partners and they will vote against Don except for the clinching argument: money. As a partner Don must be bought out, and the others can't afford that. Besides (Roger shrewdly adds) how would you like to court a client and pass Don in the hall with Mary Wells on his lap?

So Don is back in the firm. Bert says so, leaving the "stipulations" for Joan to enumerate: No drinking in the office ("outside of client hospitality" -- a nice loophole). You must stick to the script (which must be approved by the partners) in presentations and you are never to be left alone with a client. Worst of all, you will report to Lou. To Lou!

What can he say but yes? He will (as Stacey observes) make short work of Lou.

There is an undercurrent of melancholy. Stan: "What are you doing here?" Joan: "What a pleasant surprise. . .What are you doing here?" The carousel in Central Park reminds one-eyed Ken Cosgrove of Don -- a reference to the latter's greatest triumph: the "carousel" wheel for Kodak. Peggy, defiant: "We didn't miss you." To which he sighs, and what else can he say but Thank you?

My prediction. The elegies are premature. Whatever happens now will feel original but will secretly repeat something that has already happened -- just as, when he dines with prospective employers, a beautiful blonde appears, announces her name ("Emily Arnett") and her hotel room ("top floor next to the elevator"). Just his type, too.

But when we see him enter a hotel room it is not hers but Roger's. He is intent on going back to the firm and being the genius that everyone else in advertising wants to be. He even sheds his hat and dons a hatless raincoat look.

Meanwhile, some things don't change, even though the daughters of farmers have shed their bras. Betty Draper's kids will always hate her.

Love,

Harold (Harry) Crane, head of media, the most dishonest man in Jim Cutler’s entire experience of advertising, and will I lose my job as a result?

Do you believe Megan Draper is the “new woman” and Betty Draper-Francis the old, foundation garment wearing model?

What movie is Don Draper watching at the opening of this episode? It looks like an Antonioni movie, but there is also a whiff of San Francisco about it, n’est-ce pas?

What do you think will happen to Dawn if she EVER EVER puts Don on hold again???

Is there a more heart squeezing sound and sight on television in the year of our lord 2014 than Don Draper apologizing during a late night coast to coast phone call?

Does Stan have a crush on Peggy, regardless of how nasty, brittle, self concerned, competitive and vindictive our once innocent Peggy has become? He is nicer to her than anyone else can bring themselves to be, and seems to have a hide as thick as a rhino’s when it comes to withstanding her increasingly caustic, withering remarks.

Is it a surprise or to be expected that Don is a terrible flower arranger? The impatient way he flops into a vase the bouquet he bought Megan after he flies to LA and is waiting to surprise her in her LA hideaway made the Japanese Ikebana-ist within this student of Les Hommes Fous shudder uncontrollably.

Was there something weirdly sexy about watching Betty Draper-F. drink a sip of warm, just-squirted-from-the-cow milk out of a NOT pristine galvanized metal farm pail and then hearing her murmur shyly, after wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, with a hint of surprise in her voice, “it’s sweet!”

Are not loving a parent and hating a parent the same thing (re Betty’s saddest of the sad questions to her second husband about her children: “Why don’t they love me?”)

Will Megan end up on a Twilight Zone episode, due to her frazzled chance encounter, when assailing a director she’d auditioned for, with Rod Serling?

If so, will Matt Weiner treat us to a scene from said T. Z. episode as part of an upcoming installment of Les Hommes Fous? One can only hope.

Sincerely,

Adjunct Professor of Mad Men in Training (on her year of study abroad)

April 23, 2014

You were absent last night so I thought I'd let you know what you missed.

It is Valentine’s Day 1969. There will be two declarations of love and a lot of flowers. The amorous blonde real-estate agent, a California girl in the Beach Boys sense, tells Pete she loves his flowers and him. He's luckier than he knows. But unhappy.

The unhappiest of the lot is Peggy, who doesn’t know it’s Valentine’s Day until teammates Stan and Ginsberg point this out in the morning elevator. She thinks the roses sent to her secretary (Shirley) by her fiancé (Charles) are meant for her and must have been sent by Ted. Wishful thinking takes the form of hysteria and she sends messages to LA-based Ted -- as morose and enigmatic as ever – that he must find incomprehensible and so he ignores them. It made me review the history of her love life: Pete, Duck, the leftwing journalist she calls “the Jew” when she and her mother have a fight. That’s it.

Now there are two black secretaries. No one can tell them apart so Shirley calls Dawn Shirley, and Dawn calls Shirley Dawn. The symmetry of their situations on this day (each is transferred, but not fired, by disgruntled bosses) makes its point about the evolution of racism: from segregation and exclusion to marginalization and suspicion. I hate myself for using the word “marginalization” but am too lazy to think of something better.

Joan gets an office of her own. On relations of bosses and secretaries: “Scarlett and Harry are practically married.” Getting it on with his secretary is a longtime Harry trait. For the first time it occurs to me that Harry Crane has the same name as Harold Hart Crane but has nothing else in common with the author of “The Bridge.”

Roger gives off an air of defeat. In the street someone has said to him, “Mind your own business, Kike.” Was it because he was wearing a homburg? Who still wears a hat in 1969? Only the Jews.

Lou or Lew (who occupies Don’s office) remains clueless, insensitive. What does he do all day?

Sally Draper, beautiful in makeup, remains the truth-teller. “Do you still love Megan?” “Why don’t you tell her you don’t want to move to Los Angeles?” On the car radio as her dad drives her back to her prep school: “Eleanor” by the Turtles.

Don sleeps late, watches “The Little Rascals” and sit coms on TV, measures how much Canadian Club he’s drinking per day, pays Dawn for office info. Writes note to excuse Sally’s absence. What should he write? The truth, she says. And when she asks why he is not working, he says he told the truth about himself – but at the wrong time and place, to the wrong people. And what is the truth? “Nothing you don’t know.”

The old Don, poker-faced, tells Sally that they are going to leave the diner without paying. But it’s a joke, and they smile in recognition of the rogue impulses that link them. So when she tells her dad, before closing the car door, “Happy Valentine’s Day. I love you,” it is not just a formula she utters but. . .the truth.

Love,

Trudy [Campbell]

(I wasn't there either but turned up in a Smirnoff's commercial: "Done and done.")

On Monday, Apr 21, 2014 at 4:57 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear Trudy,

Excellent summary of the show. You did look fetching in that Smirnoff commercial (though, SORRY!, the wisdom of choosing that cheap muscle rub over, say, grey goose, absolut, Stoli, or many others (almost any other self respecting vodka!) escapes me. You truly looked grand , pretty, and relaxed with your long hair, half dancing down the liquor store aisle, and you’ve slimmed down since the baby. All this proves that you’ve only prospered since giving that philandering Pete the boot (at least we can cling to this belief till a new episode contradicts us.) Hope Tammy is doing well. Off in the wilds of distant, uncharted california, Pete’s looking jowly, paunchy and dressing like an over the hill golf pro , in case that gives you a secret twinge of vengeful pleasure.

Sally Draper wins an emmy for darkest eyebrows on a female on tv, except on occasions when a Frida Kahlo biopic is being shown. The heavy black brows suit her, and seem to be a direct genetic reference to how intensely she is spawn of Don. Yes, Sally is shaping up to be quite a beauty, not surprising given her pedigree, and at bottom, daddy’s girl.

Bout time Joan got her own office!!

Will someone please find Peggy a handsome, kind, calm, understanding, patient boyfriend? Before she brings a pistol to work or starts having to mark her liquor bottles as Don is doing, just to keep track of personal consumption. Maybe she’ll get addicted to valium?

Great double entendres about dating and sex flying across the table during Don’s well lubricated lunch with another ad man who might woo him away from his current position, eg “Don’t spoil the mood,” “I’m just looking for love” etc.

Sally’s private school pals cram into a little femmy dorm room, envying their classmate whose mother has just died...with Sally allowing as how she’d give anything to “get Betty underground.”

Lou is so repugnant (that actor is doing a great job making us hate him, with very little, few lines, no backstory at this point) that I am looking forward to some kind of horrendous disgrace befalling him soon, hopefully at the hands of a woman.

Did Roger send Joan flowers on valentine’s day, saying they were from her (their!!!) son? Were we ever given a plot twist that dispensed once and for all with Joan’s inept armed forces surgeon husband? How is her little boy? How’s her love life?

Oh Peggy! You haven’t found the way to be a generous, fair, good tempered boss. You’re channeling all the wrong parts of Don. Your innocence is turning to brittleness too soon.

Due to several categories of glitches, I was not able to watch the mad men episode till last night, hence my delay in responding to your vital 10 part query. And now we viewers have the second episode almost upon us.

1. Poor Peggy indeed. And poor Joan. When will the Mad Men bra burning/Gloria Steinem/1st wave feminist episode be aired?

2. Don's replacement is worse than a dullard, and hopefully will do something really outrageous to get himself run out of the company on a rail so Don can return, UNLESS the move is going to be to have Don start his own renegade agency, maybe in California, rescuing Peggy and Joan and a few other worthies in the process. Likely?

3. Pete is ever vile and deliciously snarky. And he looks horrid in golf shirts! Which is perfect! (or was it a tennis shirt?) How soon will Don boff the blonde real estate babe Peter had his arm around?

4. Poor Megan in so many ways! Which will destroy her first? Her marriage to Don or her having willingly walked into the maw of deepest darkest Hollywood?5. I would like to see more of the woman on plane. What are the chances? 6. I'm a little fretful about what moves Roger's daughter is going to pull now that she has "forgiven" him. I smell membership in a cult or weird religion on the horizon as the reason she's so "forgiving" now. Maybe born again? 7. Those orgies are going to sap Roger's strength. But I like his spirit of inquiry about everything. 8. I share your confusion about where Don is living now...since he's still being paid maybe he kept that swank flat? Yet with Megan's rent in Laurel Canyon or Hollywood Hills, or wherever she moved, and her not seeming to be employed in movies and TV quite yet, perhaps he's had to take a smaller cheaper place where the doors stick? What are those doors a metaphor for? 9. Yes, forest fires and coyotes...this is what passes for a portrait of California. 10. I wish you and Stacey were bi-coastal as Mad Men now seems to be!

Going to a Dodger game tonight. They are playing the Diamondbacks. Hope they squash them.

April 01, 2014

Fox network announced today that it will headline its lineup of fall programming with "America's Next Top Bard."

In the pilot, contestants are asked to memorize and recite a soliloquy from Hamlet, to write a bad sonnet on a quotation to be disclosed from Susan Sontag's literary essays, and to take part in the "Instant Haiku" round. Veteran impresario Bob Holman and singer Stacey Kent join Franco and Lehman as hosts and judges.

Forthcoming episodes will focus on competitors representing elite colleges, corporations, and television networks. The celebrity competitors in the pilot are Kate Mara, Josh Charles, and Elisabeth Moss, pictured at left, a Los Angeles native, who will turn thirty-two on July 24.

Lehman explained that the thematic unity of the pilot derives from T. S. Eliot's characterization of April as "the cruelest month."

"That's as much as I can say right now," said Lehman.

Subsequent episodes will follow the format similar to other "America's Top" reality programs: a large pool of aspiring poets will be winnowed down over the course of a season to one standout winning bard. Participants will be matched with poetry mentors who will advise them on developing a "voice," adhering to poetic forms while inventing new ones, writing a convincing bio note, and applying makeup for an author's photo. The winning prizes will include publication in The New Yorker "Page Turner" blog, an off-site reading at an upcoming AWP conference, and lunch with an esteemed poet of the winner's choice.

Judges will come from the ranks of former guest editors of The Best American Poetry. Rumors have circulated that Bill and Hillary Clinton will be reunited with former White House guests Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, and Robert Hass to judge the crucial fifth elimination episode. Matthew Weiner, creater of the popular Mad Men series, who recently disclosed in a Paris Review interview that from ninth grade on he "wrote poetry compulsively," is likely to anchor at least one episode as a judge.

February 17, 2014

The murderer played by Henry Silva in a 1956 episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" quotes lines from this romantic poem:

The fountains mingle with the river And the rivers with the ocean,The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single,All things by a law divineIn one another's being mingle-- Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another;No sister-flower would be forgivenIf it disdain'd its brother;And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea--What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me?

The picture of John Keats at the top of this post was chosen deliberately to deceive.

For bonus points, identify the poem's title. The first person who posts the right answer or the best imaginative alternative will be declared the winner by our panel of distinguished and disinterested (as opposed to uninterested) judges. Members of the Lehman family, especially disgraced brothers, are ineligible. Other rules may apply.

January 16, 2014

I’d pretty much had it with serial-killer narratives – on TV, in movies, in pop novels. I was tired of the dead-helpless-women trope that recurs in too many of these plots, weary of the murderers who are frequently portrayed as brilliant masterminds we’re meant to reluctantly admire, exhausted by the hardboiled ethos that’s accrued around the men and women who solve these cases. But then along came, last weekend, the premiere of True Detective, on HBO. It’s about two police homicide detectives in Louisiana and how they handled a very grim case.

The detectives are played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, initially as an almost comic odd couple. Harrelson plays Martin Hart, a laconic good ol’ boy, a married-with-children working stiff. He’s paired with McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, a burned-out-case loner cop who’s coming off years as an undercover agent arresting drug dealers. They eye each other warily and play to each other’s strengths: Hart has a fine work ethic and a doggedly logical manner; Cohle is an obsessed workaholic and alcoholic, steeped in a half-eloquent, half-loony existential philosophy that leads him to make near-mystical divinations of human character that cohere as smart hunches.

True Detective is structured so that we watch Cohle and Hart investigate the first murder in 1995, and then the show cuts back and forth to present-day interviews with the two men: They’ve been called in by the police to be interrogated about their crime-solving methods, because another murder has been committed, and it’s possible that Cohle and Hart, who thought they’d caught their killer in the 1990s, may have fingered the wrong guy.

One thing that immediately distinguishes True Detective from other shows in this genre is its writing: All eight of its episodes (I’ve seen four so far) are written by one man, Nic Pizzolatto. A novelist and short-story writer, Pizzolatto is fond of something that’s usually the death of drama on TV: The monologue. Interviewed separately, McConaughey and Harrelson reel off pages of words, paragraph after paragraph, supposedly facing another cop but actually looking straight into the camera at us. And as their individual monologues proceed, their lives unravel for us: We learn about Hart’s disguised temper and marital infidelity; of the depth of Cohle’s despair for the worthiness of humanity. Pizzolatto’s scripts are rich with the eloquence of the everyday, of men straining to explain their lives in guarded language that ends up revealing more than they intend. Pizzolatto has an immense talent for the first-person-singular: I recommend his tough-guy novel Galveston (2010), also written in this style, as well.

Every episode of True Detective is also directed by one person, Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed the 2011 remake of Jane Eyre. The result of this one writer-one director creation gives True Detective a focus and intensity that transcends the suspense of who committed the killings. The series plays out like an exploration of spiritual exhaustion enlivened by the energy of ordinary life – it suggests that getting through the day, day after day, contains enough drama and comedy (and True Detective is fitfully hilarious) to sustain even the most played-out lives… and by extension, one of the most played-out genres in pop culture.

January 13, 2014

(Ed. note: I had just about exhausted every crime series available on Netflix when Terence Winch wrote to suggest that I check out Love/Hate, an Irish crime drama series broadcast on RTÉ Television. The show is irresistible, and I was especially drawn to Darren, a central character played by the compelling young actor Robert Sheehan. Just the other day, this poem appeared in my in-box. I love it! Thank you T.P. Winch for letting me share it here. -- sdh)

January 10, 2014

Now in its second successful year, The Chicago School of Poetics (CSoP) is kicking off 2014 with truly unique online course offerings and amazing opportunities to work with leading international poets in an intimate and collaborative setting.

From the comfort of your home or a nearby café, you can participate in courses using our innovative and user-friendly program—choose face-to-face, real-time video or simply listen in. Join an international conversation—courses have included students from Morocco, Canada, and Australia, as well as from the United States. This is a friendly environment for anyone who is looking to refine their work and connect with others.

Also, check back at chicagoschoolofpoetics.com for registration information about our next master class with Pierre Joris on April 26.

The glowing space is ours. CSoP showed the way!—Eileen Myles

This is what a school truly should be – think of Black Mountain College – beyond all the boundaries & borders. —Ron Silliman

I am surprised at how much I have learned and how much my writing and editing process has evolved. —Angie T.

I felt lucky to receive such input from an established poet and the price was a bargain because I felt I gained a lot from the class. —Michael S.

Winter 2014 Course Offerings

Poetics Level I with Kristina Marie DarlingSaturdays, February 22 – March 29 Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST Blending lecture, written exercises, and in-class feedback this course is designed to help you view your poetry with the cold eyes that are necessary to make instinctual edits based on the many tools at your disposal.

Pulse Poem Pulse with Barbara BargMondays, February 24 – March 31 Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST Language is a poet’s instrument. This class focuses on developing dexterity and creativity with the rhythm, texture, and tonal qualities of language. Students will break language down to its melodic and percussive elements and explore rhythms and sounds from diverse, sometimes unusual sources.

Red-Headed Stepchild: The Unholy Spawn of Poetry and Story with Sharon MesmerTuesdays, February 25 – April 1 Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST Students will examine some very early examples of what we now think of as “hybrid” writing, then blend the hallmarks of those early models (brevity, spontaneity, tightly-focused imagery) with contemporary ideas and techniques (collage, appropriation).

Shock the Monkey: Poetry and Mass Media with Larry SawyerSundays, February 23 – March 30 Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “Art is anything you can get away with” will be a stepping off point for an examination of how current or popular music, movies, and the cult of celebrity influences one’s world and therefore also one’s writing. Students will study the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortunes of present-day celebrities and use appropriation, investigative methods, parody, the conceptual, replacement methods, hybrid narrative, and ekphrasis to push the limits of their poetry.

Erasure Poetry with Kristina Marie Darling Thursdays, February 20 – March 27 Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST This course will focus on erasure poetry, meaning poetry created by excising significant portions of a found text, which is then edited, shaped, and structured by the poet.